Comment by sieve
1 hour ago
> 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.
>Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.
chatgpt has 900M weekly active users, so a significant fraction of the world population. Given that the user base probably skews towards rich countries, its proportion among the local population is probably even higher. On the other hand what do you think is the proportion of people who take trains, especially in the US? What about steel plants?
>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).