[gordian-mind]

Requiring $7 billion in collateral, nearly half the cost of the entire $15 billion project, to insure the utility’s full capital investment in case the company walks away, is completely insane. “Existing customers should not subsidize data centers” seems like pure demagogy there.

[qlte]

If the details in this article are correct, it’s because they need $7 billion dollars worth of power infrastructure built out for their 1GW datacenter, not an arbitrary punitive penalty.

You seem convinced it has to be demagogy but that’s a significant amount of concentrated risk for the utility on a single project that could evaporate and leave them holding the bag, forcing rate increases for existing ratepayers.

https://archive.md/voqjr

  Local utility We Energies’ “very large customer” tariff requires any data centre developer with an S&P rating below single A minus to post collateral in the form of cash or a letter of credit. The size of the collateral is determined by the value of any power plants and transmission lines built to service the data centre.

[TitaRusell]

These companies all need government funded infrastructure to profit from. Basically tax payer money.

At least in a Cyberpunk world Arasaka has their own universities and power plants. We can't even have that.

[gordian-mind]

You'll never guess what structure contributes most to "government funds": guess what, it starts with "com" and ends with "panies".

[johnnyanmac]

I paid 9 thousand in taxes this year, does that give me the privilege to take out 80k in loans, no questions asked? That's pretty much what you're arguing.

And that's not even a fair comparison. My loan wouldn't go towards something that ultimately raises everyone else's energy bills and become a noise pollution factor.