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The fight against data centers has nothing to do with data centers

9 points by tosh ago | 21 comments

paradox242 |next [-]

No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know. They are a gigantic externality, plunked down in the midst of people who do not benefit from them, but have to bear the costs of the noise, pollution, and increased energy and water costs.

steego |root |parent |next [-]

I’m in Ashburn Virginia and I literally live less than 1 mile from the highest concentration of data centers in the world. People are buying townhomes homes built across the street from data centers.

What you might not understand is Loudoun heavily regulates data centers in this area. All infrastructure improvements needed to power and cool the data centers are paid by service providers. The water used to cool our data centers is sourced from our wastewater which goes through a special treatment facility that was funded by the tax revenue from the data centers.

Our property taxes are lower because the tax revenue from the data centers makes up for the difference. We have excellent schools and fantastic recreation facilities.

Oh yeah, our electricity rates and water rates are competitively low too.

I’m not here to champion data centers, nor am I claiming this is what normally happens when a data center is built.

I’m trying to point out that when they are TAXED and REGULATED, they can actually be a boon the local community.

The problem you’re seeing in these other communities are local governments bending over backwards to bring in data centers to the expense of the local population. They’re paying higher rates for water and electricity because the data center wasn’t forced to pay for infrastructure upgrades upfront, so those costs get passed on to the public.

I don’t mind the data centers. I see them every day and walk past them. They don’t emit pollution and they’re quiet and I’m not interested in moving away. I like it here.

mindslight |root |parent [-]

I'd say the underlying problem here is the general lack of accountability. We have a breakdown in the social contract of the idea that there is any kind of justice to be had by the common person. This manifests in concerns both about the physical data center themselves - high pitched whine from cooling fans that everybody seems powerless to stop, and natural gas power plants snuck in under the auspices of being "temporary" - and also concerns about the displacement of humans by "AI", for which there is also zero belief that there could be political will to stop it against the wishes of the corporate class.

I'm sitting about 10 feet away from my own rack, and yet I'm happy that my municipality just passed a datacenter moratorium. Why? Because once these things are built, there appears to be nothing the community can do to force them to fix problems (on pain of shutdown) or otherwise regulate them once their externalities become apparent. So the only rational thing to do is to say no from the outset.

steego |root |parent [-]

You’re right. The problem is most local governments do not know how to enforce accountability when working with organizations that want to build data centers.

If your local government doesn’t already employ competent people that can properly regulate and oversee the infrastructure impact of a data center, they will be overwhelmed by experts who know how to steamroll them. Passing a moratorium is the right thing for that community to do because it’s clear their local government isn’t up to the task of keeping a giant corporation (that employs armies of experts) accountable.

It is safer to say no from the outset.

mindslight |root |parent [-]

I'd say that's half the problem. The other half is the regulatory environment causes the risk to land completely on the municipality (ie the community). If a datacenter gets approved, and then turns out to have something like subjectively objectionable noise, the datacenter will point to the approval containing no restrictions on noise, or engineering figures showing that it technically meets some requirements. At which point the municipality will basically be prevented from creating new regulation to prohibit the offending behavior. It's like if the kid next door got a loud car stereo, so you worked to get the city to pass a noise ordinance. But then you were told that your neighbor specifically could continue blasting his music since he bought the stereo system before the ordinance was passed.

And that's before getting into federal nonsense where if a community does successfully reign in a datacenter, there is a chance the operator could appeal to the federal regime to override the local laws (as we're hearing about with the on-site natural gas power plants and whatnot). It's best to just not allow any kind of foothold in the first place.

quantified |root |parent |next |previous [-]

And amplified by the concerns in the post. Many people against them who aren't neighbors wouldn't get as exercised about the centers if they were other, familiar noxious entities. Oil refineries are a necessary evil in our current economy, for example. The AI stuff is an unnecessary evil, the majority of what it helps with is relatively trivial and the costs have been real already. The only way we get abundance from it is by losing enough population that there is more water, energy, arable land, minerals, housing, and other resources for the remaining humans.

marssaxman |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The same is true of factories, mills, distribution centers, stockyards, and industrial facilities in general. As these things go, datacenters are relatively benign.

Taronar |root |parent |next [-]

What a horrible argument, at least i can work at a factory and have a livelihood, I am the economic extractor, with a data center someone else is an extractor and i am left with the mess.

marssaxman |root |parent |next [-]

That's a different complaint. I was responding to the previous commenter, who said, "No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know": but people getting rich off anything choose to live in exclusive residential areas rather than industrial zones, so I don't think this is a meaningful argument against datacenters particularly.

thepryz |root |parent |previous [-]

Data centers surely provide jobs to the local community. Construction can bring in thousands, but even the operation of a modern data center employs a lot more people than the common narrative would lead you to believe. What obscures that operational employment is that it’s not uncommon for a large percentage to be contingent workers or third party vendors

ImJamal |root |parent |previous [-]

I am guessing people who live near the factory, mill, etc are more likely to work at them, which does provide benefit to them.

cucumber3732842 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one

Which is more about the people getting rich off them and less about the data center. Once you hit a certain tax bracket living beside any sort of commercial activity that isn't consumer facing becomes below you.

I live near a paper mill, freight rail and a bunch of manufacturing. I don't think anyone here would notice a data center if it didn't show up in our power bills. But, and this relates pretty directly to Mark's comments, this is also a blue collar area so not very threatened by AI, if anything people kind of embrace it because it's a power/wealth transfer away from the people who they see as keeping them down by regulating the source of their wealth out of state and overseas.

salemh |root |parent |previous [-]

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adjejmxbdjdn |next |previous [-]

The post is not wrong. It’s just incomplete and the headline is wrong.

A lot of what Cuban is saying is true. But in the U.S., a lack of regulations means that the local effects of data centers, in terms of overloading the grid, water supplies and creating noise (and sometimes air) pollution are significant.

thepryz |root |parent [-]

This is the issue. There are big differences in how individual companies build and operate data centers. The average hyperscale data center from a major player is vastly different than some of the crypto mining, small time data center builds I’ve seen.

An AI-focused center from AWS, Google, or Meta tends to be large, but also relatively quiet and they make a lot of effort to ensure they’re not overloading the local infrastructure because it poses operational and strategic risks. They also don’t want to alienate the community because they need to get their workforce from the community and they they require a lot more people in site than what most believe.

At the same time, I’ve seen “data centers” built from shipping containers that you can hear cooling fans whining from a mile away.

At the end of the day, the blame really should fall on the local governments to enact and enforce regulations and any anger really should be directed at them.

qsxfthnkp2322 |next |previous [-]

I don’t want to be in the permanent underclass.

emsign |next |previous [-]

The people next door beg to differ. Also big LLMs aren't the AI we will actually be using, it's small local LLMs. These data centers are a dead and everyone knows that, even the people building them, but not the people paying for them.

dosisking |root |parent [-]

LLMs in general have a limited use, and are a dead end. So small local LLMs are also a dead end. That of course, does not stop people from using LLMs for purposes that they are not good at.

kgwxd |next |previous [-]

It absolutely does have to do data centers. You do not speak for the common man, dip shit.

thepryz |root |parent [-]

The common man is grossly uninformed and highly susceptible to misinformation of which there’s a lot of around data centers.

jeffrallen |next |previous [-]

Refreshing honesty from the billionaire class.

Not that being a billionaire is particularly classy.

aaron695 |previous [-]

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