These datacenters can be built in ways to limit this kind of noise pollution, but it appears local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents.
I don't know anything about this particular site, but I presume it's one of the new mega gpu sites.
I'm seeing many people in the comments with an early 2000's era concept of datacenters. The scale of these new sites is mind boggling. Take your idea of a typical datacenter building. Make it 4x bigger. Then put 4 of them together into a cluster. Then imagine 10 of those clusters at the site.
> Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spent almost $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members booted from office.
Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create?
A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).
A small number of jobs for security guards.
Maybe a tiny number (one to three?) for individuals tasked with actual hardware swapping within the data center itself.
And all of the above assumes the data center owner does not "travel in" the requisite individuals on an "as needed" basis -- in which case the only jobs that may go to the locals is "security guard".
But all of the "sys-admin" management level work can be done remotely.
So the actual number of new jobs that arrive in the locality is likely on the order of 20-30 or fewer.
Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.
How many of these are on-going jobs vs during construction and as-needed? I think you're right it'll be only security guard jobs. Even if they don't travel in workers, it's quick short-term tasks that maybe locals can perform, but that's not "creating jobs."
> A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).
Its no car dealership but probably a reliable source of work-orders. Seems like a "gigascale" datacenter would be a large job for a tradesman to be a subcontractor within and afterward its scale means continuous upgrades/maintenance.
Is there any literature of ongoing economic impact of similar facilities?
In a town of 12K people I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Most of if not all the labor to build it will be flown in, most of the labor to staff it will be moved in.
And once it's built it's not like a Walmart or something where you need enough staff to police the crowds...there are not crowds. There's some rack and stack needs, and some ongoing cabling needs generally,and some other stuff, but they are staffed as lightly as humanly possible.
I suppose w/ all the out of town labor to build it there will be more waitress and hotel cleaning jobs for a while...a town or over...where they can actually house the labor.
Oh, and they are getting an Olive Garden...which will probably employ more local labor.
Festus isn’t small because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s right there with Arnold, Barnhart, Crystal City, and other far south suburbs of St. Louis. The metro area can build it. It’s not like Boeing brings in remote labor from around the country every time they build an F-15.
It will raise $8-$18m/yr in property tax revenue for the county (depending on abatements), which will likely increase the local counties revenues by 30-50% and primarily go towards local schools, as well as an estimated 50-150 jobs.
If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.
The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.
"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."
This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.
Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.
> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents?
If locals are qualified then yes.
The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.
It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.
Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology.
Almost none. Its entire value is in one-time construction regional purchasing and the ability to say the word “jobs” to the cameras. Occasionally they have the guts to charge market rates for resources or taxes but for the most part that’s heavily discounted. (See also e.g. The Dalles’ attempt to secretly sell much of its watershed to datacenters.)
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development
I hesitate to say it, but at least the datacenter companies haven't realized that federal railroad laws mean that the feds can preempt state and local governments with regards to railroads and yards ... though it may be hard to argue that a datacenter is a necessary part of a railroad.
It’d be a lot easier to argue that a railroad yard is a necessary part of a datacenter, and then eminent domain and pave it :)
But there’s some sensible planning in linking datacenters and railroads, honestly. Truck-shipping 44U fully-loaded cargo racks in standardized quarter-containers would a lot more sense in today’s AI-proliferation context. And I’d be up for seeing datacenters lose their natural lock-in resistance to customer migrations; “a competitor offered us a 5% discount plus freight refunds if we shift at least 5 cars of racks to them” is a lot easier when your datacenter has cargo crane capacity. There’s still a place for bespoke DCs but for the cog-in-the-cloud stuff that we have now, it’s not a bad idea!
(And, if you add a third rail for power-over-Ethernet, then you can start to have datacenter migrations that don’t cause an outage. Amtrak is already implementing the first stages of datacenter-grade connectivity for riders on their trains, though not amperes of the necessary degree yet.)
A railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability.
Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc.
Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.
A railroad is the infrastructure for transporting commodities. In the modern digital economy, datacenters along with the whole internet infrastructure are the modern railroads, which need protection and deregulation for the sakes of safety, national security, economy etc etc. Maybe this argument works better if the others don't?
I'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative.
I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.
Also a choice the local government can make! I don't know about this specific case but I suspect we'll see local governments get more sophisticated when negotiating with tech companies.
> and it increases electricity costs for the region
This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. If we charged twice as much money per kilowatt-hour for datacenter electricity compared to residential, it feels like the net revenue for electricity could be roughly the same to the power company, but then it wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the residents of the town having their prices spike way up.
Or, you know, the AI companies could actually supply their own power like I keep hearing tech bros mention is coming soon.
Possible and reasonable don't guarantee anything with big businesses. Around 2008, Atlanta had a major drought, and as the local government asked the citizens to conserve water, Coca Cola was bottling up the local water and sending it out on trucks. When the citizens complained, the government said it would cost too many jobs to stop the bottling.
Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)
If it's allowed by regulation and zoning, they generally don't have a say in the first place. These stories are never about building another box-shaped building in an industrial zone. We're talking about rezoning, variances, or otherwise preferential treatment.
I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.
Data centers are high-dollar projects that sound great and officials are able to look like they're doing things to increase revenues, generate jobs, create infrastructure and put the community on the forefront of high-tech. Altogether, those are commendable increases, but the devil is in the details, in that all of those things do not occur at once and the costs associated with have a much longer payoff timeline.
Property tax and (in some cases) utility taxes are deeply attractive, especially in places with large industrial-zoned swaths of land nobody is really interested in.
This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.
If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.
There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.
The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.
> There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.
> This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...
> gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible
Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...
It’s a bit crazy that the elderly are blocking data center buildouts while they also expect to collect a big chunk of everyone’s payroll. Pick your lane.
Like, what did “the elderly” ever do for us? Aside from literally creating the civilization around us, and the infrastructure necessary to support it? Seems perfectly reasonable to expect reward for that, rather than pollution and increased energy costs.
Perhaps local gov that gets the gift of datacenter (aka hundreds of millions in taxes) should subsidize residents rooftop solar installations by a slight bit. Sounds like a fair deal to every party involved.
The coucilmembers probably got their bag already from whoever is building that datacenter, voting them out after the fact just means they don't have to clock in.
Generally this is good. Representatives should represent their populace and not monied interests. When they fail to do so they shoudl be removed. That's when democracy is operating correctly. But the article still contained the falsehood that data centers create jobs. This is just not accurate. Most data centers are acres of racks and HVAC with precious few humans to maintain them.
I wish when they write these storied they'd put the town's per capita income in brackets the way they do with politician's party affiliation or company's ticker. The "Fairfax of St. Louis" voting out half their legislature over a project means something very different than the "Newark of St. Louis" doing the same.
Because wealthy suburbs have said "not here, move your filthy industry somewhere else" since forever.
When the places that aren't swimming in jobs, the local government isn't swimming in property tax revenues and frankly probably can't even enforce the rules they're federally compelled to have without destroying everything says "take that somewhere else" it means something entirely different.
It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do. 'Dead malls' that are being partially converted into pickleball courts and places for people to take their daily 'constitutional' indoors are going to seem quaint.
That is if the bubble doesn't pop because of other factors first that is...
> It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do.
These are just prefab tip-up walls with metal roofs, bar joists, columns spaced 30-40 feet OC, and a 6” concrete slab.
It’s no different than an Amazon distribution center once all the electrical substations, switchgear, generators, and UPSes are gone.
... sure, again once it's all pointless it's still a gigantic concrete box. Tons of old hastily built automotive factories just rotting around detroit.
I'd say having your house fall to a third of its value while your electricity bill triples is a perfectly rational argument for opposing a data center. If the data center is that valuable, pay the residents current market value for their property and give them a million dollars to uproot their life. Letting giant corporations impose massive costs on the folks that don't have the money to buy politicians is not an efficient outcome.
They are. Well okay, it is about 5km away, but it is in the direction of my backyard. They are quiet neighbors overall, not much traffic compared to most other jobs. The only thing not to like is someone negotiated a tax 10 year break on us.
More importantly, I'm not NIMBY if at all possible.
Sounds good to me. As far as industrial neighbors go it doesn't get any better than a glorified warehouse. The scale of these facilities means keeping a few local contractors in the trades in business indefinitely - electricians, plumbers, etc. Not ideal in terms of number of jobs gained, but those jobs tend to be high quality.
Power costs are a concern, but it doesn't matter if it's across the street from me or 100 miles away on the same PJM interconnect. In the end it likely would strengthen the local grid where I live.
Water usage is just overblown social media rage bait for the most part in most locations at least. So long as it's not a stupid ridiculous design go for it.
The only thing I'd rage against are tax credits. But I'd be strongly against those no matter the project going in. The only public money spent should be on adding traffic lights or improving road access if needed, and I'd want to see that being justified.
This assumes an actual datacenter. Not one with a co-located power plant. These are different things.
Many folks lived near datacenters and had utterly no clue or care until they were told to be mad about it. I'd point them out to visitors or when traveling to family and they'd never have known the difference otherwise. It's effectively living next to an office park.
And unless they also build their own power plant, everyone in town has to pay higher electricity prices to cover the new demand. That is the primary complaint I have been hearing.
If anyone wants to add any other complaints to the list, I'd like to hear them. I might be forced to have this argument in my parent's hometown in the coming years.
And sucking down all the electrical power in the region.
> Yet another (text) suggests residents would forget about the data center controversy as soon as they find out the city is getting a new Olive Garden restaurant.
This is becoming a pretty clear wedge between red and blue. Why do you think Musk opened his diesel turbine driven data center in rural Mississippi? Big Tech is systematically targeting small municipalities across the US with promises of insane money to anyone willing to sell out their residents. Missouri being traditionally purple, it makes a lot of sense the flashpoint would be here.
The people are, their politicians are not. Overwhelmingly this is a problem of backroom deals with state and local Republicans subverting the electorate's will.
Is it still 'NIMBYism' if what they are building is something that none of the residents want at all? Like yeah no-one wants the new sewage plant in their backyard but they will still see the value in it.
Even as someone in tech I don't see the value in this scale of buildout. This technology is very new and no doubt in my mind that in 5 years we will be able to do everything these models do on a fraction of the resources.
Those are mostly more traditional data centers. 20 or 30 kilovolt racks with separate cages for different tenants, some meet-me rooms, and a bunch of telecom gear are the order of the day.
Plugging this video about infrasound, which I only recently learned was a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
These datacenters can be built in ways to limit this kind of noise pollution, but it appears local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents.
> local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents
Or they're paid to not think about it. I don't consider Occam's razor when politicians are involved
I don't know anything about this particular site, but I presume it's one of the new mega gpu sites.
I'm seeing many people in the comments with an early 2000's era concept of datacenters. The scale of these new sites is mind boggling. Take your idea of a typical datacenter building. Make it 4x bigger. Then put 4 of them together into a cluster. Then imagine 10 of those clusters at the site.
None of that is new whatsoever. AWS has been doing that for 15 years at this point. The cloud didn't start existing just because of AI.
Appreciate you making my point for me.
> Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spent almost $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members booted from office.
Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create?
Are there jobs for local residents?
A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).
A small number of jobs for security guards.
Maybe a tiny number (one to three?) for individuals tasked with actual hardware swapping within the data center itself.
And all of the above assumes the data center owner does not "travel in" the requisite individuals on an "as needed" basis -- in which case the only jobs that may go to the locals is "security guard".
But all of the "sys-admin" management level work can be done remotely.
So the actual number of new jobs that arrive in the locality is likely on the order of 20-30 or fewer.
Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.
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How many of these are on-going jobs vs during construction and as-needed? I think you're right it'll be only security guard jobs. Even if they don't travel in workers, it's quick short-term tasks that maybe locals can perform, but that's not "creating jobs."
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> A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).
Its no car dealership but probably a reliable source of work-orders. Seems like a "gigascale" datacenter would be a large job for a tradesman to be a subcontractor within and afterward its scale means continuous upgrades/maintenance.
Is there any literature of ongoing economic impact of similar facilities?
In a town of 12K people I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Most of if not all the labor to build it will be flown in, most of the labor to staff it will be moved in.
And once it's built it's not like a Walmart or something where you need enough staff to police the crowds...there are not crowds. There's some rack and stack needs, and some ongoing cabling needs generally,and some other stuff, but they are staffed as lightly as humanly possible.
I suppose w/ all the out of town labor to build it there will be more waitress and hotel cleaning jobs for a while...a town or over...where they can actually house the labor.
Oh, and they are getting an Olive Garden...which will probably employ more local labor.
Festus isn’t small because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s right there with Arnold, Barnhart, Crystal City, and other far south suburbs of St. Louis. The metro area can build it. It’s not like Boeing brings in remote labor from around the country every time they build an F-15.
> And once it's built it's not like a Walmart
Yet it creates infinitely more value than a supermarket.
It will raise $8-$18m/yr in property tax revenue for the county (depending on abatements), which will likely increase the local counties revenues by 30-50% and primarily go towards local schools, as well as an estimated 50-150 jobs.
If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.
The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.
"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."
This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.
Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.
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> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents?
If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.
It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.
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Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.
to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent
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According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology.
[1] https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/ctec_datacenterrp...
Almost none. Its entire value is in one-time construction regional purchasing and the ability to say the word “jobs” to the cameras. Occasionally they have the guts to charge market rates for resources or taxes but for the most part that’s heavily discounted. (See also e.g. The Dalles’ attempt to secretly sell much of its watershed to datacenters.)
Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort.
Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.
A few dozen jobs in a town of 12,000 is nothing to sneeze at.
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development
I hesitate to say it, but at least the datacenter companies haven't realized that federal railroad laws mean that the feds can preempt state and local governments with regards to railroads and yards ... though it may be hard to argue that a datacenter is a necessary part of a railroad.
It’d be a lot easier to argue that a railroad yard is a necessary part of a datacenter, and then eminent domain and pave it :)
But there’s some sensible planning in linking datacenters and railroads, honestly. Truck-shipping 44U fully-loaded cargo racks in standardized quarter-containers would a lot more sense in today’s AI-proliferation context. And I’d be up for seeing datacenters lose their natural lock-in resistance to customer migrations; “a competitor offered us a 5% discount plus freight refunds if we shift at least 5 cars of racks to them” is a lot easier when your datacenter has cargo crane capacity. There’s still a place for bespoke DCs but for the cog-in-the-cloud stuff that we have now, it’s not a bad idea!
(And, if you add a third rail for power-over-Ethernet, then you can start to have datacenter migrations that don’t cause an outage. Amtrak is already implementing the first stages of datacenter-grade connectivity for riders on their trains, though not amperes of the necessary degree yet.)
A railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability.
Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc.
Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.
A railroad is the infrastructure for transporting commodities. In the modern digital economy, datacenters along with the whole internet infrastructure are the modern railroads, which need protection and deregulation for the sakes of safety, national security, economy etc etc. Maybe this argument works better if the others don't?
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Snowpiercer but with data centers? The breeze would help with cooling!
A LOT of fiber rides alongside railroad tracks. Easier to string and maintain.
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I'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative.
I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.
> it doesn't generate any real tax revenue
This is a choice the local government can make. You can read Loudon County's (us-east-1 + everything else) explaining what it does with the data center revenue it gets https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County.
> it increases electricity costs for the region
Also a choice the local government can make! I don't know about this specific case but I suspect we'll see local governments get more sophisticated when negotiating with tech companies.
> and it increases electricity costs for the region
This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. If we charged twice as much money per kilowatt-hour for datacenter electricity compared to residential, it feels like the net revenue for electricity could be roughly the same to the power company, but then it wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the residents of the town having their prices spike way up.
Or, you know, the AI companies could actually supply their own power like I keep hearing tech bros mention is coming soon.
Possible and reasonable don't guarantee anything with big businesses. Around 2008, Atlanta had a major drought, and as the local government asked the citizens to conserve water, Coca Cola was bottling up the local water and sending it out on trucks. When the citizens complained, the government said it would cost too many jobs to stop the bottling.
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Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)
Municipalities, at least in some states, can be sued for refusing development that meets existing regulation and zoning
If it's allowed by regulation and zoning, they generally don't have a say in the first place. These stories are never about building another box-shaped building in an industrial zone. We're talking about rezoning, variances, or otherwise preferential treatment.
A few steak dinners go a long way.
I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.
> I'm pro-progress
I think everyone is, by definition.
Data centers are high-dollar projects that sound great and officials are able to look like they're doing things to increase revenues, generate jobs, create infrastructure and put the community on the forefront of high-tech. Altogether, those are commendable increases, but the devil is in the details, in that all of those things do not occur at once and the costs associated with have a much longer payoff timeline.
Homeowner property tax would be 37% higher in Loudon County if not for all the datacenters. DCs are a great subsidy for the county coffers.
Property tax and (in some cases) utility taxes are deeply attractive, especially in places with large industrial-zoned swaths of land nobody is really interested in.
It's the second thing
> increases electricity costs for the region
This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.
If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.
There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.
The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.
Sure let’s completely ignore the noise pollution that makes living near one a constant hell
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> There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.
Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.
> This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.
There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...
> gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible
Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...
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Do what you must, they've already won.
It’s a bit crazy that the elderly are blocking data center buildouts while they also expect to collect a big chunk of everyone’s payroll. Pick your lane.
Like, what did “the elderly” ever do for us? Aside from literally creating the civilization around us, and the infrastructure necessary to support it? Seems perfectly reasonable to expect reward for that, rather than pollution and increased energy costs.
None of that justifies the level of government checks they receive
> increased energy costs
Perhaps local gov that gets the gift of datacenter (aka hundreds of millions in taxes) should subsidize residents rooftop solar installations by a slight bit. Sounds like a fair deal to every party involved.
The coucilmembers probably got their bag already from whoever is building that datacenter, voting them out after the fact just means they don't have to clock in.
Generally this is good. Representatives should represent their populace and not monied interests. When they fail to do so they shoudl be removed. That's when democracy is operating correctly. But the article still contained the falsehood that data centers create jobs. This is just not accurate. Most data centers are acres of racks and HVAC with precious few humans to maintain them.
I wish when they write these storied they'd put the town's per capita income in brackets the way they do with politician's party affiliation or company's ticker. The "Fairfax of St. Louis" voting out half their legislature over a project means something very different than the "Newark of St. Louis" doing the same.
And why is that?
Because wealthy suburbs have said "not here, move your filthy industry somewhere else" since forever.
When the places that aren't swimming in jobs, the local government isn't swimming in property tax revenues and frankly probably can't even enforce the rules they're federally compelled to have without destroying everything says "take that somewhere else" it means something entirely different.
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It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do. 'Dead malls' that are being partially converted into pickleball courts and places for people to take their daily 'constitutional' indoors are going to seem quaint.
That is if the bubble doesn't pop because of other factors first that is...
> It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do.
These are just prefab tip-up walls with metal roofs, bar joists, columns spaced 30-40 feet OC, and a 6” concrete slab.
It’s no different than an Amazon distribution center once all the electrical substations, switchgear, generators, and UPSes are gone.
... sure, again once it's all pointless it's still a gigantic concrete box. Tons of old hastily built automotive factories just rotting around detroit.
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I'd say having your house fall to a third of its value while your electricity bill triples is a perfectly rational argument for opposing a data center. If the data center is that valuable, pay the residents current market value for their property and give them a million dollars to uproot their life. Letting giant corporations impose massive costs on the folks that don't have the money to buy politicians is not an efficient outcome.
Props to these folks for protecting their community. Maybe they can build the data center in your backyard instead :).
They are. Well okay, it is about 5km away, but it is in the direction of my backyard. They are quiet neighbors overall, not much traffic compared to most other jobs. The only thing not to like is someone negotiated a tax 10 year break on us.
More importantly, I'm not NIMBY if at all possible.
Sounds good to me. As far as industrial neighbors go it doesn't get any better than a glorified warehouse. The scale of these facilities means keeping a few local contractors in the trades in business indefinitely - electricians, plumbers, etc. Not ideal in terms of number of jobs gained, but those jobs tend to be high quality.
Power costs are a concern, but it doesn't matter if it's across the street from me or 100 miles away on the same PJM interconnect. In the end it likely would strengthen the local grid where I live.
Water usage is just overblown social media rage bait for the most part in most locations at least. So long as it's not a stupid ridiculous design go for it.
The only thing I'd rage against are tax credits. But I'd be strongly against those no matter the project going in. The only public money spent should be on adding traffic lights or improving road access if needed, and I'd want to see that being justified.
This assumes an actual datacenter. Not one with a co-located power plant. These are different things.
Many folks lived near datacenters and had utterly no clue or care until they were told to be mad about it. I'd point them out to visitors or when traveling to family and they'd never have known the difference otherwise. It's effectively living next to an office park.
Datacentres aren't mills. Mills employed hundreds of people and mill owners invested in property to house the workforce in the local area.
Data centres are mostly ran remotely, employing a handful of people to watch a fence line.
And unless they also build their own power plant, everyone in town has to pay higher electricity prices to cover the new demand. That is the primary complaint I have been hearing.
If anyone wants to add any other complaints to the list, I'd like to hear them. I might be forced to have this argument in my parent's hometown in the coming years.
And sucking down all the electrical power in the region.
> Yet another (text) suggests residents would forget about the data center controversy as soon as they find out the city is getting a new Olive Garden restaurant.
This was so funny.
This is becoming a pretty clear wedge between red and blue. Why do you think Musk opened his diesel turbine driven data center in rural Mississippi? Big Tech is systematically targeting small municipalities across the US with promises of insane money to anyone willing to sell out their residents. Missouri being traditionally purple, it makes a lot of sense the flashpoint would be here.
Red states are against the deals as well. Many people in Texas are fighting back but sometimes it’s too late because the deal was done in secret.
It's crazy that these are done in secret. From the article: "The operator of the data center hasn't been identified" -- that's shouldn't be allowed.
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>Red states are against the deals as well.
The people are, their politicians are not. Overwhelmingly this is a problem of backroom deals with state and local Republicans subverting the electorate's will.
That data center is in the Memphis suburbs, 5 miles from the airport, in the third largest city in the state. Wouldn't call it rural
NIMBYism comes in all colors
Is it still 'NIMBYism' if what they are building is something that none of the residents want at all? Like yeah no-one wants the new sewage plant in their backyard but they will still see the value in it.
Even as someone in tech I don't see the value in this scale of buildout. This technology is very new and no doubt in my mind that in 5 years we will be able to do everything these models do on a fraction of the resources.
This is 100% not a political issue, red & blue are lining up against DCs. the DC capital of the world is Northern Virginia which is bluer than Bernie
Those are mostly more traditional data centers. 20 or 30 kilovolt racks with separate cages for different tenants, some meet-me rooms, and a bunch of telecom gear are the order of the day.
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