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by cosmic_cheese 6 days ago
Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.
2 comments

I don’t understand why they’re doing this? Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive they’d rather build on top or right next to housing? Is it the water supply ? I don’t understand why someone would do something so clearly self defeating
large, new, far out, grid hookups usually get done in units of years, you don't just call the power company and order one. I think a location with an existing connection to the power they need probably takes priority over every other location decision.
> Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive

Yes.

Source: learned more than I want to about solar farm development.

Anytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it.

Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.

Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.

The French government already did this to Pavel Durov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel... , which I'm sure people like Zuckerberg and Musk paid attention to and developed countermeasures for. After the arrest, Telegram started cooperating more with warrants from various countries' national police. Signal has better security and privacy guarantees than Telegram and is probably what ordinary people should be using instead of Telegram.
Isnt Telegram barely encrypted anyway
idk, at least in DFW the biggest datacenters from the late 90s and early/mid 2000s are in the suburbs where everyone lives. There's some in and near downtown but there's not enough space or it's too expensive. The big datacenters were built where the giant neighborhood were built, places with lots of land for relatively low cost.