Comment by squibonpig
4 days ago
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents.
The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
What portion of datacenters being built in the next five years go towards the existing Internet and why do we need more datacenters for the internet right now? I could point to a bunch of issues with the internet and more datacenters would fix none of them.