Comment by perks_12
2 hours ago
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)
> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland)
I think you are discounting the speed at which solar is accelerating in southern Europe. Power is already pretty much free during the daytime on the Spanish and Italian grids, and grid-scale battery installations are starting to come online to spread that curve wider.
> I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction
read the article:
> Lombardy alone accounted for 63% of the applications submitted throughout Italy.
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
> If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.
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)?
many futures are open to us. It isn't a question of going back to an imagined past, it is choosing and shaping the future we create.
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.
The Luddite movement wasn’t opposed to progress or technology. They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
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Interesting — so in your opinion every country must build out datacenters or be left behind?
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This is a lot of assertions with zero evidence.
* fantastic technology [citation needed]
* economic suicide [citation needed]
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Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?
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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.
Exactly. There are plenty of data centers being built in places that want them. The neat thing about data is that it's a quick speed of light to anywhere on the planet, so it doesn't matter where they are.
Anyone who wants to opt out can do so and it'll play out just fine for them.
The hyperscalers want to sell AI services in Europe. Not everything is about supply, a lot of it is about demand.
> 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
The hyper-scaler rhetoric absolutely applies here. The proposed Utah data center project will use more energy than the entire state. Do we really need this? The heads of labs have been very clear that the explicit intention is to take away our jobs. We have a choice.
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.
Spot on. The difference in thinking with the US is enormous.
I wonder if all they want from the future is fat people on mobility scooters like the beginning of wall-e.
Sure, AI may be the future for a certain market, but datacenters aside we will always need clean land, air and water, food for our bodies and homes to live in.
This is a pretty broad generalization with nothing offered to back it up. In addition, it seems pretty insulting generally.
I think we need a citation about the libertarian / capitalism thing? I know a lot of leftist engineers. Look how blue the bay area votes?
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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.
Which leaves us with plenty of time to take a stroll in our drought-stricken nearby park. What fun we'll have reading the placards of all of the species that used to exist in the nearby creek.
Or if we're above wet bulb climate conditions again, we just watch the newest algorithm invent stories for us built on the uncredited labor of real artists.
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.
But in this case what does a country lose by blocking any and all data centers in its borders? A few ms latency?
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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?