To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.
Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.
So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.
As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.
[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)
I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure.
EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that because it sounds better. Local municipalities should definitely charge significant land rents or zoning fees so that the community benefits. China has been very successful at this for decades.
EDIT: Very rough overview after some research, using Colossus 1 as reference, which is among the biggest GPU deployments. Not thoroughly verified, but it'll be around the right ballpark.
- Electricity: 150 MW live, with another 150 MW planned/studied. That is like adding a medium electric-arc steel mill or large chemical plant to the grid. A small standard power-plant can generate about that much.
- Land / space: About 217 acres and 785,000 sq ft. Footprint-wise, that is like a large factory campus or logistics park; much smaller than a mine, port, refinery, or industrial farm, but far beyond a normal commercial warehouse.
- Water: Roughly 1.3–3M gallons/day in public estimates. That is comparable to the consumptive water use of a small-to-mid steel plant or a large industrial cooling site; not refinery-scale, but locally significant.
- Air pollution: The servers are not the dirty part; the issue is on-site gas turbines/generators. That makes it more like a small gas peaker plant than a steel mill or chemical plant. Colossus 1 reportedly used up to 35 gas turbines before grid connection.
- Noise: Mainly cooling equipment, substations, batteries, turbines/generators. More like living near a substation or small power plant than near a mine, port, or metalworks.
- Traffic / logistics: Heavy during construction, then relatively light. Much less disruptive than a port, mine, farm, steel plant, or refinery, because there is no constant flow of ore, scrap, fuel, chemicals, crops, containers, or waste.
- Heat: Nearly all consumed electricity becomes heat. At 150–300 MW, the heat rejection is industrial-scale, closer to a small power station / large process plant than normal manufacturing.
Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.
The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
Noise pollution is huge and water usage is through the roof which could worsen the effect of droughts where water is already scarce. Not to mention the imbalances they generate on power distribution.
In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits.
I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.
The point is that most utilities like transport infrastructure and sewage treatment benefit local residents and the broader society directly. Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.
All of these create a ton of jobs in the local area and many of them provide massive advantages to the local area (except railway lines if you're not near a station I guess).
A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, but would also bring massive truck loads to the local roads and corresponding pollution. The low staffing of datacenters means that one they are built there is little transportation impact.
The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.
They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.
The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.
> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.
Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.
It's worse than that. Data centers aren't a net zero for the area, they're a net negative. They use up water, arguably pollute said water [1], they jack up the price of everybody's electricity (because everyone else ends up paying for the extra infrastructure), can cause pollution directly (eg xAI runs highly-polluting gas turbines in a city through a legal loophole of them being "mobile" [2]) and aren't the quiet, unseen facilities proponents make them out to be (eg [3]).
On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.
I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.
the law addresses exactly this. it greatly overtaxes datacenter in green spaces and lowers taxes in former industrial areas.
Regarding whether it's a good development drive... I can tell you, most companies could save a shitload of money by buying a few pallets of machines and racking them in a... datacenter.
I see our monthly AWS bill, I highly doubt we'd be spending that in datacenter bills.
Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
As an Italian, I second that this is clearly a populist manoeuvre. Nobody in their sound mind would ever build a big datacentre in Northern Italy, the energy costs are way too expensive. There is no untapped hydro power available, fossil fuel is obviously always going to be more expensive than elsewhere, no nuclear power and you can't roll in a massive solar array with batteries due to how cramped the Po Valley already is. It would ironically make more sense to build it in Southern Italy, where once the political issues are sorted out, the access to wind and solar power are way easier and there are a lot of underdeveloped areas.
But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
Europe can opt out if they want, hyperscalers are building in South Asia, SEA and MENA where they get tax breaks. We'll see how that plays out for Europe.
I still haven't seen anybody demonstrating we have to do such thing.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
Engineers, in general, tend to be libertarians and have a positive outlook on capitalism. They are, in general, people that have no roots, or any sense of culture or taste.
Which is why they are uncritical towards what we call progress - they are not in a position where they could lose their culture, their roots, their home because they do not possess anything like that. They are men without qualities, revelling in their obsession with optimisation, mowing everything down that may introduce friction in their parasitic nature.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
>It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
The way I see it, we hit a ceiling with the capabilities of AI. Singularity will most likely not happen (not with the resource hunger of current methods). What remains are incredible tools to help remove the most tedious tasks from everyone's work.
> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
The future doesn't always care about what the majority wishes since not everything is up for debate, like for instance the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons, or whether your neighbor or allies suddenly decide to invade you.
AI is front and center of any new digital product these days. More and more tedious tasks are automated using agents, even in small businesses. Assuming Europe won't invest in datacenters, eventually it will find itself in a position where it is completely dependent on US and Chinese companies providing the core to such solutions to them. This will eventually lead to a situation where more and more value creation will flow towards these economies.
> But blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.
I am usually apposed to any tax on anyone or any entity for any reason but I am also jaded after a lifetime of seeing taxes almost entirely go to fraud waste and abuse that only grows with time and very rarely ever shrinks. me and my weird fantasies about implementing the code of bushidō in all governments world wide.
This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.
Yes and no. There is money allocated to grow specific crops and if it were up to me that would vanish. Farmers would go back to growing what the economy was demanding and not artificially propping up corn for ethanol.
I would take vehicles in two directions. EV's where it makes sense and hyper efficient hybrid vehicles that emit clean exhaust and get 150+mpg to fill some EV gaps until battery tech progresses quite a bit more.
My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?
Just had to read few more paragraphs : "the use of disused former industrial areas is favoured. In this case there are no additional burdens, but rather the law proposes bureaucratic simplifications."
It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"
Indeed, I don't quite understand the issue. I get that the data centers are big and expensive, but they must be nothing compared to any ordinary heavy-industry site right? In all aspects: space, pollution, energy, water...
Sure, why not. But if you drop an AI datacenter in the middle of an agricultural area, you won't be able to find it. Because AI datacenters are actually tiny by comparison.
This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.
Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.
Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.
Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.
LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.
There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
That was true 30 years ago, but is less true today. That doesn't mean farmers don't have inordinate power, but that's the same in most developed countries with rural areas (see also, the USA, Japan, etc).
This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.
As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.)
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.
We already produce far more food than we need. The amount of land in the US used for corn ethanol production alone is the size of a medium European country.
Data centers are not displacing food. That argument is disingenuous. Even in Italy agricultural land goes unused because of low demand.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.
Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.
To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.
Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.
So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.
As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.
[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)
I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure.
EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that because it sounds better. Local municipalities should definitely charge significant land rents or zoning fees so that the community benefits. China has been very successful at this for decades.
EDIT: Very rough overview after some research, using Colossus 1 as reference, which is among the biggest GPU deployments. Not thoroughly verified, but it'll be around the right ballpark.
- Electricity: 150 MW live, with another 150 MW planned/studied. That is like adding a medium electric-arc steel mill or large chemical plant to the grid. A small standard power-plant can generate about that much.
- Land / space: About 217 acres and 785,000 sq ft. Footprint-wise, that is like a large factory campus or logistics park; much smaller than a mine, port, refinery, or industrial farm, but far beyond a normal commercial warehouse.
- Water: Roughly 1.3–3M gallons/day in public estimates. That is comparable to the consumptive water use of a small-to-mid steel plant or a large industrial cooling site; not refinery-scale, but locally significant.
- Air pollution: The servers are not the dirty part; the issue is on-site gas turbines/generators. That makes it more like a small gas peaker plant than a steel mill or chemical plant. Colossus 1 reportedly used up to 35 gas turbines before grid connection.
- Noise: Mainly cooling equipment, substations, batteries, turbines/generators. More like living near a substation or small power plant than near a mine, port, or metalworks.
- Traffic / logistics: Heavy during construction, then relatively light. Much less disruptive than a port, mine, farm, steel plant, or refinery, because there is no constant flow of ore, scrap, fuel, chemicals, crops, containers, or waste.
- Heat: Nearly all consumed electricity becomes heat. At 150–300 MW, the heat rejection is industrial-scale, closer to a small power station / large process plant than normal manufacturing.
Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.
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The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
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Noise pollution is huge and water usage is through the roof which could worsen the effect of droughts where water is already scarce. Not to mention the imbalances they generate on power distribution.
> Datacenters are weird
In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits.
I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.
The point is that most utilities like transport infrastructure and sewage treatment benefit local residents and the broader society directly. Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.
>train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases
All of these create a ton of jobs in the local area and many of them provide massive advantages to the local area (except railway lines if you're not near a station I guess).
A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, but would also bring massive truck loads to the local roads and corresponding pollution. The low staffing of datacenters means that one they are built there is little transportation impact.
> A warehouse or factory would have more jobs,
It would add low value-added jobs though (unskilled labor). Datacenters add high value-added jobs (skilled labor).
Only looking at the headcount is shortsighted imho.
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And there is almost zero value generated locally.
Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.
You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.
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Where? What do you tax? Per request?
They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.
The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.
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> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.
Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.
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Because company profits are booked at their European HQ (so Ireland or Luxembourg).
So there is little profit being taxed at the Datacenter/country Level.
It's worse than that. Data centers aren't a net zero for the area, they're a net negative. They use up water, arguably pollute said water [1], they jack up the price of everybody's electricity (because everyone else ends up paying for the extra infrastructure), can cause pollution directly (eg xAI runs highly-polluting gas turbines in a city through a legal loophole of them being "mobile" [2]) and aren't the quiet, unseen facilities proponents make them out to be (eg [3]).
On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.
I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
[2]: https://earthjustice.org/case/xai-illegal-gas-power-plant-da...
[3]: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/n...
> they destroy green space
the law addresses exactly this. it greatly overtaxes datacenter in green spaces and lowers taxes in former industrial areas.
Regarding whether it's a good development drive... I can tell you, most companies could save a shitload of money by buying a few pallets of machines and racking them in a... datacenter.
I see our monthly AWS bill, I highly doubt we'd be spending that in datacenter bills.
Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
As an Italian, I second that this is clearly a populist manoeuvre. Nobody in their sound mind would ever build a big datacentre in Northern Italy, the energy costs are way too expensive. There is no untapped hydro power available, fossil fuel is obviously always going to be more expensive than elsewhere, no nuclear power and you can't roll in a massive solar array with batteries due to how cramped the Po Valley already is. It would ironically make more sense to build it in Southern Italy, where once the political issues are sorted out, the access to wind and solar power are way easier and there are a lot of underdeveloped areas.
But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
Just read the article
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
Sometimes you will need to do stuff even if energy is not cheap. Come on (I’m italian too)
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
OOC, which past exactly do you want to go back to (and presumably stay at)?
We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.
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Europe can opt out if they want, hyperscalers are building in South Asia, SEA and MENA where they get tax breaks. We'll see how that plays out for Europe.
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> So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”?
what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers
I still haven't seen anybody demonstrating we have to do such thing.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
Engineers, in general, tend to be libertarians and have a positive outlook on capitalism. They are, in general, people that have no roots, or any sense of culture or taste. Which is why they are uncritical towards what we call progress - they are not in a position where they could lose their culture, their roots, their home because they do not possess anything like that. They are men without qualities, revelling in their obsession with optimisation, mowing everything down that may introduce friction in their parasitic nature.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
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>It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
wow, I'm so excited for this "future" where everyone is laid off and miserable
The way I see it, we hit a ceiling with the capabilities of AI. Singularity will most likely not happen (not with the resource hunger of current methods). What remains are incredible tools to help remove the most tedious tasks from everyone's work.
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it's happening whether you like it or not.
> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
> It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
I believe it has more to do with preserving the landscape that attracts so many tourists.
Solar farms in Italy faced resistance for the same reason.
It's not green politics.
Pretty sure blocking it will work perfectly.
You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
The future doesn't always care about what the majority wishes since not everything is up for debate, like for instance the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons, or whether your neighbor or allies suddenly decide to invade you.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely
What does that even mean?
AI is front and center of any new digital product these days. More and more tedious tasks are automated using agents, even in small businesses. Assuming Europe won't invest in datacenters, eventually it will find itself in a position where it is completely dependent on US and Chinese companies providing the core to such solutions to them. This will eventually lead to a situation where more and more value creation will flow towards these economies.
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> But blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
Good.
I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.
I thought we wanted robots to take over the boring and back breaking jobs?
That's very close to a coin flip.
This is surely a huge blow to all the hyperscalers looking to build datacenters in the agricultural regions of Italy.
Who needs computers, anyways
I am usually apposed to any tax on anyone or any entity for any reason but I am also jaded after a lifetime of seeing taxes almost entirely go to fraud waste and abuse that only grows with time and very rarely ever shrinks. me and my weird fantasies about implementing the code of bushidō in all governments world wide.
This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.
Isn't there already enough graft directed towards farmers?
Yes and no. There is money allocated to grow specific crops and if it were up to me that would vanish. Farmers would go back to growing what the economy was demanding and not artificially propping up corn for ethanol.
I would take vehicles in two directions. EV's where it makes sense and hyper efficient hybrid vehicles that emit clean exhaust and get 150+mpg to fill some EV gaps until battery tech progresses quite a bit more.
My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?
> built in green/agricultural areas
So they want them in other areas instead? Like next to residential area?
I'm not sure they understand the implications...
Just had to read few more paragraphs : "the use of disused former industrial areas is favoured. In this case there are no additional burdens, but rather the law proposes bureaucratic simplifications."
It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"
Perhaps an AI summary would have helped here
>Like next to residential area?
or... industrial areas?
Indeed, I don't quite understand the issue. I get that the data centers are big and expensive, but they must be nothing compared to any ordinary heavy-industry site right? In all aspects: space, pollution, energy, water...
old industrial areas, which sometimes are pretty far from residential ones
Sure, why not. But if you drop an AI datacenter in the middle of an agricultural area, you won't be able to find it. Because AI datacenters are actually tiny by comparison.
This is the way
I don't understand why they're looking to increase the tax rather than just banning them.
Italian farmers pay effectively 0% taxes on land and the areas are quite poor. Data centers on the other hand pay lots of taxes.
Why would they ban productive uses of land?
Obviously because they care more about things than just making money.
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That's very black and white.
They don't pay "lots" of taxes. They pay taxes for the two engineers and 8 janitors working there.
You can’t eat data centers
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This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.
Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.
Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.
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at some point the additional tax revenue outweighs the downsides
I disagree as you can't eat or drink tax revenue.
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Tax revenue doesn't outweigh clean water. Without clean water, we die.
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Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.
LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.
There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.
Is it inherent to the architecture of LLMs/GenAI or rather is it because VCs fund what they can capture and others can't fund?
Agricultural areas? After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades, now Europe wants to become an autarky?
1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.
> 1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
As if it was a charity lmao, this is a top priority, before defense even, food security will become more and more of a problem, that and water
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If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
> the main purpose of the thing
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
The EU is an agricultural union with a bit of other stuff sprinkled on top.
That was true 30 years ago, but is less true today. That doesn't mean farmers don't have inordinate power, but that's the same in most developed countries with rural areas (see also, the USA, Japan, etc).
This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.
> After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades
What? A quarter of EU expenditure is spent on agricultural subsidies, i.e. directly paying people to be farmers.
I imagine they're thinking of late 19th century. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.)
[0]: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.
Yeah, but they do produce food which data centers do not. This is an odd argument to make.
Only a very small fraction of farmland produces food we directly eat. The OP's linked article has a great illustration of that.
We already produce far more food than we need. The amount of land in the US used for corn ethanol production alone is the size of a medium European country.
Data centers are not displacing food. That argument is disingenuous. Even in Italy agricultural land goes unused because of low demand.
that's the argument an AI will make to preserve itself.
Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't.
They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.
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Please at least pretend to read the article before posting something like that.
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Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
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The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.
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One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.