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MostlyStable 2 hours ago [-]
Increased demand drives up prices under a fixed supply regime. Power is, in many places of the US, something approaching a fixed supply regime. This is not a physical requirement of the universe. It is a policy choice that we have made. I would argue that it is not the data centers driving up power prices, it is our policies around how difficult it is to provision new power (or build almost anything at all) in the US.
Congress could fix this problem tomorrow. And in fact there is a bipartisan bill (BAAJA) that would go a long ways (although not all the way) towards fixing it. Now yes even if we fix these policies there would be a time lag on new generation being connected, but there is no reason to leave this problem in place.
porkshoe 2 hours ago [-]
The main problem identified in this article is cost allocation, not rate of deployment. Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth. Speeding up permitting would simply accelerate this subsidy to data centers, with households paying even more, sooner.
Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years. The problem is that capex deployed to serve data centers is being paid for by households, not that it cannot be deployed.
Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear price increase there from data centers.
The bill you cited would fix much of this, but it would do so via provisions forcing data centers to pay for the costs they cause, instead of forcing households to subsidize them.
If your point is “it’s policy,” fine. But the policy causing this is cost allocation, not permitting.
Your comment doesn’t engage with the article’s central finding at all: who pays.
whimsicalism 36 minutes ago [-]
> Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth.
Data centers pay for electricity under the tariffs utilities charge them. To the extent their demand increases wholesale electricity prices, it's the normal consequence of additional demand competing for constrained supply. In no other market is it standard for the person outbidding to also pay for continuing to provide the service to the person who was outbid. The only reason there is much incremental grid cost is because utilities are legally required to continue serving their residential customers. It seems extremely reasonable for residences to share in some of these costs when getting electricity at a significant discount from market price.
The notion that 'households' are paying for data center electricity is just not what is happening. Maybe residences should get discounted electricity, but again this is a policy question and I'm not sure the best use of the marginal federal dollar.
> Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
Investment is not transmission built, I don't see how this disproves the well-documented countrywide transmission delays. If anything, it is an indication that we are transmission bottlenecked.
pyrale 24 minutes ago [-]
The theory you can defend can be summarized by an apt name: locust capitalism.
whimsicalism 17 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, exactly the sort of substantive conversation I come to HN for.
consensus1 1 hours ago [-]
In this case the other 62% is only $5.1 billion, which averages out to about $15 per person across the US. Since this is reflected in wholesale electricity prices I assume it is even enough that after accounting for unequal impact, it still isn't that high. It seems like a problem, but not a major one.
paimapi 57 minutes ago [-]
That average is a false equivalency since the cost subsidy will be localized to the regional power provider typically the state-run monopoly or some other large provider. It's not an even distribution and the core thesis of the article, that the lower-income folks are the ones subsidizing it, likely still holds because land is historically cheaper and is generally less developed by municipal and state govts when its residents are lower-income and/or a minority population, and local distribution (and costs) impact those with less (usually no) disposable income by which they can improve their household energy efficiency.
consensus1 31 minutes ago [-]
This makes no sense because the impact here is increased costs on the utilities which is then passed through as rate increases. Unless lower income people consume more electricity than rich people (doubt) then it doesn't impact them more.
BobaFloutist 5 minutes ago [-]
They're saying it's not $15 from each of the $350m people in the US, it's a much larger number from each of the much smaller number of people unlucky enough to share a utility with one of these new data centers.
phs318u 45 minutes ago [-]
Well, since it’s “only” $5.1 billion, the trillion dollar valued companies should have no problem paying costs in full rather than seeking subsidies from the hapless taxpayers.
UncleOxidant 2 hours ago [-]
> Congress could fix this problem tomorrow.
Even if congress "fixed" this problem tomorrow it would still take years to build the increased capacity (as you note). Since we do essentially have a fixed supply regime the fast buildout of data centers we've seen over the last few years has indeed been the cause of increased power prices. I'll also add that several renewable power generation projects had been in the works and this administration killed them (even paying a lot of money to kill them).
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
Congress can’t fix the problem tomorrow. The problem is tied to non-existent distribution infrastructure.
sarchertech 2 hours ago [-]
There is new data center project 30 miles outside my city that plans to build a 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain (to quite the developer it will burn 350-500 truckloads of logs per day).
If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.
celtain 1 hours ago [-]
One of the perverse things about our current permitting regime is that it's often easier for a company to build a private natural gas power plant connected to their data center than it is for the local utility to build a new wind or solar farm. The former can often be done without any kind of discretionary permit at all, whereas the latter goes through a public process in which residents can complain and sue to block the project.
And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
My town just found out about the forest service’s intent to do some major logging and the truck traffic is way out of spec to the existing roads to the trees.
The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.
so from the article, 200 truck trips over 5 years.
we're honestly screwed as a country, funny to see.
whimsicalism 32 minutes ago [-]
Biomass is almost certainly a better form of energy production than whatever your existing energy mix is and it is being villanized, nice.
Micrococonut 4 minutes ago [-]
Better how?
whimsicalism 3 minutes ago [-]
More sustainable/co2 neutral/renewable.
pyrale 32 minutes ago [-]
> it is our policies around how difficult it is to provision new power (or build almost anything at all) in the US.
The issue isn't how difficult it is to provision new power, it's that no matter how cheap it will be and how unregulated it will be, datacenters will look to 1) skirt environmental law, and 2) arbitrage cheaper areas that end up being forced to split the price to increase production between the dcs and the locals.
Very large consumers should be required to pay for new production when it's obvious that only them benefit from it, there's absolutely no reason to split the bill with the locals, especially when datacenter have close to zero local economic benefits.
rconti 19 minutes ago [-]
If the cost of capital improvements is divvy'd up among ratepayers, and a huge amount of new generation needs to be built out and amortized over a large period of time, and the datacenters pay less per kWh than the residential consumers, residential rates go up regardless.
xboxnolifes 29 minutes ago [-]
Aren't most markets fixed supply, at least in the short to medium term? Outside of something like software (where you can just copy paste code and hardware is usually not the limiting factor), there is a ramp-up period between an increased demand and an increased supply. No matter how you want to spin it, a huge increase in energy demand is going to have an increased in energy costs for at least months to years.
omgwtfbyobbq 34 minutes ago [-]
It could be both. I think people reasonably state it's data centers driving up prices more than other things because we've power as a mostly fixed supply in many places in the US for a while, and the recent increase in lower income/rural areas had correlated all with data center expansion as opposed to other things like EV adoption, etc...
JeremyNT 56 minutes ago [-]
> Congress could fix this problem tomorrow. And in fact there is a bipartisan bill (BAAJA) that would go a long ways (although not all the way) towards fixing it. Now yes even if we fix these policies there would be a time lag on new generation being connected, but there is no reason to leave this problem in place.
There's plenty of reason to leave the problem in place. The current regime is corrupt, and energy scarcity benefits entrenched fossil fuel players who are cozy with the administration.
Congress has up until now given its endorsement to all of this. Will a new Congress care? Time will tell.
chickenbig 2 hours ago [-]
This is true on the assumption of inflexible demand. Flexible demand may change this, especially reducing non-market capacity payments, for instance.
Thank you for doing the work of keeping in the know on this sort of topic and notifying us all of the bill. I'll check it out and send a letter to my congressmen if it checks out.
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
There are rural parts of Massachusetts that have run out of natural gas and electric delivery bandwidth. The simplest solution is non-grid connected power and heat generation. Doing this requires no real change in regulation since the power sources are stand alone. Local building codes are the only regulations.
cowlevel 29 minutes ago [-]
isn't the simplest solution to upgrade the grid? What non-connected power do you envision that isn't natural gas and isn't so expensive you may as well connect it to the grid and upgrade the grid to handle it?
verdverm 2 hours ago [-]
If BAAJA means that data center companies can install jet engine gas turbines to power their needs, people are not going to be happy.
I agree the permitting process has hindered building in America, but I'm not convinced the current regimes in charge can craft legislation that actually helps people. America keeps voting for something new because the last attempt hasn't changed the status quo.
PorciiVorbesc 40 minutes ago [-]
> data center companies can install jet engine gas turbines to power their needs
From the people I talk with, the data centers are not a problem in themselves. It is the irresponsibility around them that is the problem.
PorciiVorbesc 5 minutes ago [-]
That doesn't say they're gonna put airlines jet engines in datacenters just that the company will make gas turbines for the AI boom, and gas turbines for power generation are everywhere. Nuclear power plants also use turbines.
unethical_ban 2 hours ago [-]
NYT has an op-ed today encouraging BAAJA, but all the comments are ripping it for bias. Notably it seems to strip away protections for historic sites and takes away rights from Indian tribes. Imagine running HVDC lines through tribal lands, over the Grand Canyon or other historic landmarks - things that would be prevented today that would be legal tomorrow.
I haven't read it, and I do support some level of expediency with grid buildout, but it sounds like it opens the door to ruining cultural landmarks, no prevention of abuse for fossil fuel purposes. Finally, and I mean this honestly: If the administration supports it, it probably is something worth pausing to consider.
whimsicalism 27 minutes ago [-]
Pendulum has swung far too far towards historic preservation over the last half century.
consensus1 58 minutes ago [-]
There is too much protection for historic sites (most of which have trivial historical value) and Indian tribes have way too much power to extort money out of infrastructure projects.
1659447091 37 minutes ago [-]
> Indian tribes have way too much power to extort money out of infrastructure projects.
They have too much power? On their land?
Separately, Here is their objections for anyone interested
It's not their sovereign land, except in the sense that the entirety of the US is 'their land.' Tribes are sovereign over their own land and BAJAA does not change that. It is common for tribes to litigate things outside of their own lands and administered by/for the public, for instance this landmark case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation_v._United_States...
lakeviewterrace 40 minutes ago [-]
> Imagine running HVDC lines through tribal lands
What if they only ran the transmission lines behind their eyesore casinos?
cowlevel 29 minutes ago [-]
Do property rights end when the stuff on your property is ugly?
whimsicalism 4 minutes ago [-]
Property rights end when you don't own the land and its federal lands administered by & for the public
I find their methodology misleading, though. They're basically taking the cost of transmission infrastructure upgrades and then assigning the cost of those upgrades proportional to peak energy demand of the customer base, not the cost of the infrastructure upgrade.
So if, for example, they estimate that residential customer demand will grow by 10%, then they suggest residential customers should only be paying for 10% of transmission infrastructure upgrades.
That's not how infrastructure upgrades work, though. Connecting 100,000 new residential addresses and areas can cost more than a couple data centers that are close to the power station.
The problem is they don't have access to, or at least they didn't look very hard, to find the actual data about transmission line upgrades and how much data centers actually pay to get connected. Contrary to what I see in a lot of the comments here, big customers do actually get billed for their infrastructure upgrade costs after utilities do their analyses. This paper is ignoring the utilities' analyses and substitutes their own highly simplified proportional-to-peak-demand estimates, and that's how they get their headline number.
One very surprising discovery was that they show data center construction incentives to actually be a good deal:
> State incentives for data centers have provided returns on the investments, if inconsistently, the researchers found. Some states, such as California, reaped $180 in worker income for every dollar spent, while Virginia increased income $2 for every dollar invested. The researchers determined that the presence of an existing, qualified workforce was a stronger indicator of high returns than the amount of incentive spending.
That's not what I expected to read.
This is a topic where details basically don't matter for public opinion, though, so I'm not sure it matters. It aligns with what people
hathawsh 3 hours ago [-]
I struggle to understand why data centers are seen as a problem rather than an opportunity. Cities and counties can charge a high property tax to data centers and the residents can benefit. They might even give residents a dividend from the data center property tax. What's wrong with that plan?
alistairSH 3 hours ago [-]
The article discussed this... data centers don't pay for the infrastructure upgrades they need to operate - the majority of that cost gets foisted on the public. They also drive up the wholesale cost of electricity, which means we all pay more for it.
Both are solvable with politicians who can be held accountable. But, in many locations, they aren't accountable and can only be trusted to do what's in the interest of their largest donors.
That's all ignoring the various other externalities... aesthetics, noise, pollution.
But, 100%, if a county/town has an underutilized industrial zone, they should build data centers there. But, it also appears data center developers prefer undeveloped plots. Again, also solvable, but somebody needs to do so.
Panoramix 2 hours ago [-]
That's called corruption, it has nothing to do with data centers specifically
cowlevel 28 minutes ago [-]
This current bout of corruption is about data centers specifically.
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
Politicians acting in their own short-term interest is not necessarily called corruption.
xboxnolifes 26 minutes ago [-]
Politicians using their position of power for person gain is the definition of corruption.
Timon3 2 hours ago [-]
If a significant part of the build-out is hurting people due to corruption, what are you actually asking for? Should protesters always make sure to add a footnote mentioning that they're only protesting due to the significant likelihood of negative effects due to corruption?
Because if you're asking for them to refocus from data centers to corrupt politicians, I can confidently predict the outcome, and I believe so can you.
10u152 1 hours ago [-]
This is a regulation problem, not a datacentre problem.
In Aus, when anyone makes an application to connect to the electricity network, you get charged for ALL upstream upgrades to service your load. That might mean new powerlines, new substations upstream etc. That both shifts the load onto the DC operator AND moves them to areas where spare capacity is available.
Similar thing applies for a water connection.
Datacentres still technically drive up spot price for electricity but with the amount of new generation coming online that will even out over time. We're building DCs like crazy here and the average spot price is actually falling.
p_l 2 hours ago [-]
USA appears to have weird inversion from how things could be done, so obvious logical benefits of building datacenters are flipped into negatives - through tax breaks, incoherent infrastructure spending (industrial clients should be effectively subsidizing the infrastructure!) on top of electrical grid that might benefit from being taken behind the barn.
Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place", you're truly left only with noise pollution, which is workable to deal with and its costs can in fact be taken by developer. Hell, existing industrial zones or ex-factory land is normally preferred elsewhere.
alistairSH 2 hours ago [-]
"USA is a specially broken place"
It really is a bizarre place to live... it's both the richest nation in the world, but also uniquely broken in many really sad and confusing ways.
Pretty sure unlimited campaign spending (much of it without attribution via dark money) is a major contributor. While not legally bribery, it sure does look like a duck. Not to mention the actual bribery (747s and weddings for Trump being the most obvious examples).
p_l 21 minutes ago [-]
A particular issue is how tax is handled at local government level. On one side the flexibility theoretically allows USA to optimize. In practice... well, not.
A lot of the problems can't happen in popular datacenter-buildout areas in Poland because the local government cannot change anything about taxes nor can it give any sort of tax break and the most sweetheart deal thing you could pull is water pricing and that is also hard to sell. Nationwide rules set which government levels get what part of the taxes levied on the datacenter, and because of how what USA would call "property taxes" are calculated, there's considerable pressure for owner of the DC to get paying tenants to pay for them.
Even at maximum imaginable tax "optimization", a DC is one of the best RoI things a local government can have in Poland
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
> USA appears to have weird inversion from how things could be done
The US has a corruption problem, which is not exceptional - I don't know what place you're comparing the US to that doesn't give the rich money and the right of way where and when they want.
People say it's a "race to the bottom" without realizing what that implies. It implies that data centers will simply get deals in localities that will not benefit from data centers if other places demand that they at least pay for themselves. Why would that happen? It happens because it will personally benefit the people who have been charged with making the decision.
> Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place"
Again, compared to who? You think they'll have an easier time in Europe? You think if they want to build them in Peru that the residents will benefit?
vlan0 2 hours ago [-]
I think you are getting at something here. The benefit piece. The proximity to community. But the society in the US is not structured in a way to make this happen. Municipality is basically a bad word at this point. But imagine localized network, compute, green energy, battery etc.
p_l 29 minutes ago [-]
Because of how certain things are less flexible in many european countries, the required scale of corruption to change the rules the way they apparently are bent in USA specifically on this topic becomes impractical.
Note, I am saying specifically on this topic, I am not saying there are no other kinds of grift available.
But I have done recently a deep dive and for example in Poland, especially in the area around Warsaw, a high power datacenter is literally one of the best investments you can get, and the only real issue is to force the builder to use certain noise abatement technologies to deal with the low-frequency noise.
And while it's a race to the bottom, that does not mean that there are no other variables than price - for example, outside of AI, a large boom in EU datacenter space is due to DORA and NIS2 regulations that place certain requirements on locality and resilience
unethical_ban 2 hours ago [-]
I agree that datacenters should be treated like industrial sites. Most people wouldn't want a micro oil refinery or machining factory put up 300 meters from their house. Regulate datacenters like we would a factory. Require them to account for their inputs and their waste outputs, and prohibit them if noise levels are too high or if a concentration of them affects the local climate through heat waste.
EDIT in response to the below comment, since I've been throttled:
Noise and heat are outputs of datacenters.
p_l 26 minutes ago [-]
While I agree on noise, heat output tends to be comparable with a large shopping mall, and they use way less of all other local resources (assuming they are paying market rates for electricity etc. and not some bribe-level "tax break")
Noise requires certain extra investment at building time but can be very much mitigated below 40dB. At mid-scales (12~15 MW usable power) you can have a datacenter pretty much beside residential building and it will be the quieter one.
consensus1 55 minutes ago [-]
They have no waste output.
nemomarx 3 hours ago [-]
Any municipality that tries to do this will not get a DC built, and the one next door will promise a 3 year tax abatement or other special privileges to get it instead. It's a race to the bottom thing.
You need a coordinated policy to encourage everyone to tax them extra, or to require them to put down money for new electrical infrastructure or so on before they break ground. It would be good to have federal action on that.
ethagknight 2 hours ago [-]
Not true in Memphis. The city is reaping massive new tax revenue despite fighting datacenters
2 hours ago [-]
Almondsetat 34 minutes ago [-]
>I struggle to understand why data centers are seen as a problem rather than an opportunity.
Data centers require very little personnel to operate. It chugs a ton of water and electricity while polluting acoustically the surrounding area and basically bringing no jobs
talmr 2 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn’t they search for communities that would charge them the least? And in doing so, we have messed up incentives on both sides of the aisle.
Edge compute should be a federal build out IMO. It is considered a matter of national security, right? I could be wrong, so I'm open to discussion.
We build data centers everywhere of all sizes and shapes, they’re part of US Dept of Energy. Companies and individuals can operate them, plug into them like self-storage unit business model.
They would be powered by advanced nuclear, solar, etc. with loads of build out across the country (energy transmission, maintenance, etc.).
Why do we need to have power generation at the source (yes, it is cheaper), when we could do a large scale jobs and infrastructure project out of it that would keep folks employed for GENERATIONS! The demand never ends.
It might open up a lot of opportunities to have that level of localized edge compute, and historically speaking our computing and energy requirements have only ever grown. Give as many people (and communities) a stake into the future!
Private businesses benefit, since they build new things on top of this infrastructure. People benefit, because maintaining the infrastructure is a cost that's rolled in. Everyone benefits from it directly or indirectly (end users).
US Gov could print $1T+ bonds for this, and they would actually pay out in far more ways IMO.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
> Why wouldn’t they search for communities that would charge them the least?
They would and they should and that's efficient and good. The problem is corruption. If I go to a sandwich shop and tell them that $12 for a ham sandwich is too high, I can go from sandwich shop to sandwich shop, and eventually I will find one at a quality I can tolerate at a price I'm willing to pay (let's say $6.)
But with these corporations and billionaires, we assume that if we ask them to pay $12 for a ham sandwich, or even $6, they'll keep moving until they find a shop that will pay them $12 to take a sandwich. It's simply corruption. What they do is the equivalent of paying the cashier $3 to give them the sandwich and $12 from the till. They're shopping for the cashier that is willing to do it.
sega_sai 3 hours ago [-]
In my understanding, if anything, data centers get tax breaks, rather than increased taxes.
dietr1ch 3 hours ago [-]
tax breaks on top of subsidized infrastructure as the utility companies now invest more in infrastructure and raise the prices for all preexisting clients to pay for it.
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
Taxes would be great. If a giant new datacenter meant more money in the coffers for schools, roads, and everything else that is funded by local taxes, then that sounds like something that some places would really like to see.
But that's not how it rolls. At least around me, there instead seems to be a pattern of cities and counties of giving datacenter builds tax abatements of multiple decades in length.
And unlike something like a hospital or a steel mill or even a warehouse: After the local service industry and trades boom from the initial construction is over with, there's not much else coming out of these places. They don't provide very much in the form of long-term employment positions.
And beyond that, it's not like we know what the shape of information technology will be 30 years from now. It's certainly shaped very differently today than it was in 1996.
(And yeah, I know. If there were no tax incentives for datacenters in Location A, then they'd just build them in Location B instead. I don't have a problem with this at all, but some folks seem to find that result to be fundamentally unconscionable.)
coredog64 1 hours ago [-]
Skill issue. This is just some of Loudoun County's report on the positive tax impact of data centers.
> Data center revenue has also enabled the Board of Supervisors to fund the needs of Loudoun County Public Schools, including funding budget increases for the schools amounting to tens of millions of dollars year-over-year. This revenue source has also enabled Loudoun County to meet the public safety needs of the community, funding resources for the Sheriff’s Office and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue. Revenue from data centers has also funded many programs and services provided by Loudoun County to the community, including libraries, parks, recreation and community centers, and critical services in the areas of child protection and mental health. The Board of Supervisors has also funded capital improvements, such as schools, roads, bridges, and a broad range of facilities. All of these expenditures were made possible while simultaneously lowering the real property tax rate for homeowners.
Money is made up. Access to water and clean air are real.
tcdent 3 hours ago [-]
Furthermore, why is it assumed that as power demand and capacity rises, that prices would rise? In every other market prices drop at scale.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
> In every other market prices drop at scale.
Markets based on supply and demand all work like this. Increased demand results in the market price increasing.
Electricity demand eventually becomes fuel demand, which has the same thing: more demand results in increased prices for fuel. Since fuels are broadly substitutable in electricity generation, all fuels increase in price when there's (significant) additional demand for electricity and that tends to increase prices of everything with a significant energy component.
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
When demand increases and supply remains static, prices go up.
Supply capacity improvements are incentivized by this price increase.
(If the incentive to improve supply capacity were present at the current price level, then those improvements would already be underway regardless of whether the world had ever seen a datacenter or not.)
SamBam 3 hours ago [-]
Because data centers don't operate in the free market, they work on incentives and public funds given by cities and states.
cowlevel 28 minutes ago [-]
They don't.
WokeUp420 3 hours ago [-]
Pollution, resources and increased utility costs to name a few.
darth_avocado 3 hours ago [-]
Do you want a costco right next to your house? I believe you could do the same with a Costco, property tax, employment, yada yada
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, I would. In the scope of giant corpo entities, Costco seems like they'd be a decent-enough neighbor to have. They keep short hours: The earliest they're open for regular knuckle-draggers and ruffians is 9:30AM. They're never open after 8:30PM. On weekends, they wrap up by 6:00 or 7:00PM.
Last time I went to Costco, I parked over by the edge of the lot by fences with single-family homes behind them.
It was a busy time of day, but it seemed quiet enough. I remember thinking to myself, "Self, if I lived there, then the first thing I'd do is install a gate in that fence so I could just walk over to Costco."
And I've certainly lived in much noisier neighborhoods with far fewer opportunities to walk around and conduct commerce. I'll take the noise of Costco parking lot traffic over that of a congested 5-way city intersection any day.
Living on a steady diet of $1.50 all-beef hot dogs (with a Coke (with refill!)) probably wouldn't be the healthiest way, but I think I'd find a balance somehow.
darth_avocado 48 minutes ago [-]
The realities of living next to a Costco are a lot different than what you describe here. You don’t seem to realize that semis will keep coming over beyond the hours you describe, the pollution, noise and traffic is way higher than what you describe here and just walking over to Costco sounds nice for a minute but then you realize that it’s huge waste of time to go for smaller shopping trips, and you won’t be making larger trips all the time.
You need to have a much more honest take than this and mention the real downsides if you’re going to say you’ll do it.
ssl-3 17 minutes ago [-]
My current abode is very near to a US highway with heavy truck traffic, a flour mill, and two busy freight rail lines. Some mornings, everything outside is covered in a dusting of white powder. I keep the windows closed most of the time even in fair weather not because I hate the outdoors, but because the noise is stifling.
The road does calm down late at night, and then the grain trucks begin roaring again promptly at 0400. The trains only sleep on holidays.
And yet: I've resided in noisier places than even this.
Living right next to a Costco and being able to walk over for a hot dog sounds like a fucking dreamscape by comparison and this is a comparison that I feel I'm qualified to make.
And, sure: Costco isn't everything, and I often want only one can of crushed tomatoes today -- not 12.
But adjacent to the parking lot of the same Costco I was referring to earlier is a nice medium-sized grocery store. There's a coffee shop on the corner. A little further out is a Home Depot and an Asian market, along with quick access to an interstate highway for the things that the neighborhood doesn't provide for.
darth_avocado 3 minutes ago [-]
Okay, so what you’re describing is a living condition that is worse than living next to a Costco, and therefore would be okay living next to one, which is fair. Is there a reason why you chose to live exactly where you live, and given an option, would you move to a different place that don’t have the same problems as the current one?
What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in. Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made. I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
Toynbeeidea 2 hours ago [-]
Actually, yes, I do. That would be very convenient. Then again, I'm a city dweller. My grocery store is one block over, I literally just walk there with a fold-up wagon.
Octoth0rpe 2 hours ago [-]
I would derive direct and tangible value from a costco nextdoor, not so from a datacenter.
tjwebbnorfolk 1 hours ago [-]
Costco is currently the only business I buy from regularly that I don't have within walking distance. So yes I would love one near me.
darth_avocado 54 minutes ago [-]
Not near you, over the fence, next door. Because a lot of people agree to a lot of things until it’s next door to them.
BeetleB 40 minutes ago [-]
> Cities and counties can charge a high property tax to data centers and the residents can benefit.
My city has had issues with data centers since prior to the whole LLM craze.
The reason? They gave them tax breaks, and later on the town discovered they employ almost nobody. For the amount of land they took up, they give very little back to the community - both in taxes and in employment. It's understandable that residents would prefer the land be used for just about anything else. Even a pollution generating plant.
carabiner 2 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what the newly elected Democrat congressmen are proposing. Right now, it's the opposite where they get tax breaks, reap resources (electricity, water), while providing zero benefits to the local communities (jobs or funding).
verdverm 2 hours ago [-]
> What's wrong with that plan?
It's about more than money. People live in rural areas for reasons and data centers are rather antithetical to them.
If you want to know details, listen to those people
2 hours ago [-]
MaxHoppersGhost 3 hours ago [-]
Yes it's a huge job creation/economics boon as well. The data centers are injecting a lot of money into local economies (many of which have been shrinking) and providing skilled jobs.
jltsiren 2 hours ago [-]
The actual issue is that they don't. A 100 MW steel mill might employ ~1000 people and contribute ~$1 billion/year to the economy. A 100 MW data center doesn't need that many people even during construction, and its economic contributions are attributed to the location of corporate offices. As far as local people are concerned, any other use for the electricity would be more valuable than a remotely owned data center.
MaxHoppersGhost 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah well they aren't building steel mills in rural Texas/Louisiana/etc so this is what we have to work with.
lenerdenator 1 hours ago [-]
Well, it's arguably making things worse in rural Texas/Louisiana/etc., so I don't blame them for not wanting the data centers.
Understand that if the data center developers had not been so cartoonishly exploitative in their deal making in these municipalities nationwide, there really wouldn't be that much pushback. NIMBY stuff ultimately gets built all the time, usually because the money offered is just too good. Instead of using their massive amounts of capital, they struck backroom deals with local politicians to get tax credits, pass along infrastructure costs to other parties, and otherwise financially burden the community.
They had the money to go in and do all of this stuff without involving the public beyond the usual permitting processes; they just thought themselves too important to be burdened with having to spend money to make money. It's the "cult of the founder" mindset in action at the infrastructure policy level.
limagnolia 2 hours ago [-]
Got any examples of 100 MW steel mills and 100 MW Datacenters that you are comparing here? Would love to see some real side by sides if you actually have any data?
haunter 2 hours ago [-]
>Yes it's a huge job creation/economics boon as well
Is it though? Maybe the construction itself but after that running a data center doesn't need that many on-premise people, like it can be in the two digit range which is not a lot at all. And even then on-premise people won't be the highest paid engineer jobs but rather security and technicians.
MaxHoppersGhost 2 hours ago [-]
Two digit range is a lot of people in a rural area with a couple thousand residents. That's probably a double digit % increase in jobs in that community.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
Datacenters certainly provide many construction jobs during that phase of the project.
During normal operations though, you would have a handful of technicians, probably a facilities manager and frequent contractor visits, probably onsite security.
The facilities contractors may come from far away for maintenance projects, so maybe you help support local hospitality businesses.
Most of the highly paid work at the datacenter will happen remotely.
Every so often, there will be a hardware refresh, but you probably bring in people from elsewhere to do those, if it doesn't make sense to have the onsite techs do it little by little.
Certainly, there's a lot of equipment installed, and any locality with property tax on business equipment should get value from that. But otherwise, almost any other light industrial business would have more employees.
detourdog 1 hours ago [-]
The construction jobs are likely not local but migrant construction workers. The restaurants and hotels my see a bump during construction.
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing DHS won't be conducting any ICE raids if it's a data center.
MaxHoppersGhost 2 hours ago [-]
Go check out how many people live in some of these places and how many jobs there are. Even 20 additional tech jobs is a massive boost to these areas.
retwakm4 2 hours ago [-]
It is actually terrible at job creation. Data centers don't create many jobs at all, and you could argue through second and third order effects that they are job destroyers.
Data centers simply don't require very many people to operate.
MaxHoppersGhost 2 hours ago [-]
Job destroyers where? Maybe in the glass towers of NYC and SF and elsewhere. Creating even a few dozen jobs in rural communities is a massive improvement and boost to the local economy.
engeljohnb 1 hours ago [-]
You say so. All I know is rent nearly doubled in my area as soon as construction on the data center began. If that's a what a boon to the economy looks like, I'm not interested.
233mhz 3 hours ago [-]
> What's wrong with that plan?
Well, that's not the plan. The plan is massive tax cut, infrastructure built with public money and... that's it!
arjie 2 hours ago [-]
Datacenters are this generation’s nuclear power plants. Our kids will look back and wonder what we were thinking.
Marha01 1 hours ago [-]
> Datacenters are this generation’s nuclear power plants.
In that case, the accurate analogy would be: Our kids will look back and wonder why we haven't built many more of them.
vatsachak 2 hours ago [-]
False analogy. Data centers are consumers not producers. They compete with humans for infrastructure capacity. Companies need to foot the bill for improving infrastructure not humans
j45 3 hours ago [-]
It's important to remember that datacenter news is about the countries they're built in.
Not all buildings are built or powered the same way in all countries based on the weather of their location.
American lenses about American Datacenters will be about whats happening in America, not other places.
p_l 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, american idiocies in building datacenters are exported world wide as "memes" resulting in people thinking it's truth about datacenters, instead of being truth about broken politics and tax policies of USA
tonymet 1 hours ago [-]
the amount of power needed by datacenters is nothing compared to generation gap. These stories cover up the root cause: in nearly every market, no baseload generation has been added for 15+ years, and is generally declining.
Rates aren't going up because of datacenters. They are going up because no investment has been made for more than 15 years, and we have been offsetting the "crunch" with creative workarounds.
austin-cheney 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, absolutely. What do local residents get out of the data centers?
I remember earlier this year somebody posted the results of a large survey that concluded most people would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center. Of course everybody would rather have nuclear power plant in their backyard because then they get cheap, clean, reliable electricity. They get nothing from the data center except competition for basic utilities.
I also remember how the person couldn't believe the results and found them astonishing. WTF. This just reinforced for me how so many people in technology are either narcissistic, short sighted (exceptionally naive), or have some sort of qualified mental health defect.
MaxHoppersGhost 3 hours ago [-]
>Yes, absolutely. What do local residents get out of the data centers?
Jobs in places where there usually aren't any. Some of these places are nearly dead or dying towns/communities and they're getting a huge jolt of new economic activity. Once the data centers are built there will be a steady base of new workers/jobs to maintain them.
nemomarx 2 hours ago [-]
How many long term jobs for locals do they create after construction? My experience with similar booms in fracking is that you get a lot of out of town workers and some local jobs catering to them for 2-3 years and then it's pretty quiet and the money slows to a trickle once they've built up infrastructure.
DCs need some guards, some highly trained technicians, and that's mostly it, right? maybe 20-30 jobs per? That's not exactly opening up a new major employer like a factory or steel mill.
If you're facing local protests, my suggestion is offer to fund their schools for 5 years with a bond or something like that. Put the company name on a new power plant. It won't take up most of the cost of building and it'll probably get town hall to approve the zoning for you.
MaxHoppersGhost 1 hours ago [-]
That many employees in a community of a few thousand or even 20 thousand is a massive boost to the local economy. Some places these things are being built have had declining populations for decades and haven't had new jobs in as many years as well.
They aren't building steel mills or factories in too many places these days - why do people keep comparing these to data centers as if it's even an option?
bluefirebrand 2 hours ago [-]
> some highly trained technicians, and that's mostly it, right?
Do they even need the technicians on full time? I feel like those are flown out if something is wrong and otherwise can just monitor remotely?
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
All of the data centers I've worked with have had technicians onsite 24/7. There's just a lot of stuff that sometimes needs doing that's easier with someone there.
I'm sure they pull in from outside the area for large jobs like major equipment refreshes or major network changes. But for day to day stuff (and there's always day to day stuff), it's just a couple people. Some days, they're very busy and my lowpri tickets take a long time to get worked, other days my tickets get completed in minutes.
I know some companies are driving towards less intervention with racked hardware and will wait to disturb a rack until several units have failed, but you still need someone to work on those when they hit the threshold. And it's nice to have someone onsite for simple things like replacing a failing cable.
limagnolia 2 hours ago [-]
A large mega-datacenter, like the ones they appear to be talking about here, do generally have a significant onsite, full time staff.
austin-cheney 2 hours ago [-]
This has been repeatedly debunked. Data centers provide temporary construction jobs, but those jobs are rarely local unless built in a major metropolitan area. Otherwise the data centers are almost completely automated. The Facebook data center near where I live is absolutely massive and employs about 150 people. Its 5 buildings each about a 1000ft long and 2 or 3 stories, if there is nothing underground.
MaxHoppersGhost 1 hours ago [-]
150 employees in a community of a few thousand or even 20 thousand is a massive boost to the local economy. Some places these things are being built have had declining populations for decades and haven't been new jobs in as many years as well.
verdverm 2 hours ago [-]
> Jobs in places where there usually aren't any ... a huge jolt of new economic activity.
This is the incorrect analysis because it is not what is happening. If you can understand this, you can start to understand the resistance. Data centers are a tangible proxy to Ai and the Oligarchy. They look like the globalization, financialization, and deregulation that wrecked the economies they had prior - on steroids.
MaxHoppersGhost 1 hours ago [-]
I've seen this happening in rural Louisiana with my own eyes and ears.
verdverm 1 hours ago [-]
perhaps you could share a link with us
my understanding is that there are cases where it is not as bad, but by and large - and through history (corporate tax break attractions) - this has not been the case, outcomes are very situational
msandford 2 hours ago [-]
How many jobs vs how much does the price of power go up? And are they good paying jobs or are they the equivalent of being a 3PL order packer but for swapping drives?
limagnolia 2 hours ago [-]
If you have competent utility regulations and competent utility regulators, the price of electricity won't go up.... so maybe we should fix that?
Toynbeeidea 2 hours ago [-]
None of those yokels qualify (even if they do). No, you need to bring in h1bs for pennies on the dollar.
consensus1 51 minutes ago [-]
> What do local residents get out of the data centers?
A lot:
> Data center revenue has also enabled the Board of Supervisors to fund the needs of Loudoun County Public Schools, including funding budget increases for the schools amounting to tens of millions of dollars year-over-year. This revenue source has also enabled Loudoun County to meet the public safety needs of the community, funding resources for the Sheriff’s Office and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue. Revenue from data centers has also funded many programs and services provided by Loudoun County to the community, including libraries, parks, recreation and community centers, and critical services in the areas of child protection and mental health. The Board of Supervisors has also funded capital improvements, such as schools, roads, bridges, and a broad range of facilities. All of these expenditures were made possible while simultaneously lowering the real property tax rate for homeowners.
There's a reason lots of data centers are built around airports (already noisy) or in places that can't support other types of development for some reason.
Many local governments have failed in their responsibility to constituents in approving placement of DCs that should or could have better local projects like housing or retail.
unrented7977 3 hours ago [-]
Datacenters are getting sweetheart tax deals, and likely will pay way less in taxes than the people do because in the great US of A corporations can simply not pay taxes.
Do you have another argument that doesn't rely on trickle-down economics?
richwater 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, the whole point of giving them a reduction in future taxes is to encourage development in otherwise undesirable land.
You would never build residential development at the threshold of an airport for obvious reasons. So the remaining options are either leave the land undeveloped and get nothing, or build something that doesn't need quiet to generate tax revenue.
I'm not advocating for or against specific tax agreements because that is between the company and local government, who represent the people.
I looked at the linked page of corporate tax rates. Scroll down to the next graph showing corporate tax revenues. US corporate tax revenues are insignificant compared the other countries in the graph.
verdverm 2 hours ago [-]
Trickle down economics is starting to get schooled in trickle up governance
AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago [-]
What they get out of not having the nuclear power plant is not getting unexplained cancer in 10 or 20 years.
You can tell them as much as you want how safe nuclear power is. You may even be right. But after Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, they don't believe you that it will reliably stay safe forever.
unrented7977 3 hours ago [-]
How about everyone living downstream of coal plants?
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Coal plants are worse, of course. Thankfully they are so expensive to run that they are being shut down.
AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago [-]
You're giving a rational answer to peoples' emotional reaction to some very highly publicized events. That's not going to move their needle.
doctorpangloss 3 hours ago [-]
i don't believe it. where are all the nuclear power plants then? they are unpopular almost everywhere...
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
The trouble w/ nuclear power plants isn't that the public hates them, it's that the bond market hates them. Even the sticker price is a little bit too expensive but it usually seems to take several times more money and time to build one than anticipated.
Vasbarlog 3 hours ago [-]
Now that renewables are so cheap, nuclear plants are not cost effective and require massive subsidies by the state.
encom 3 hours ago [-]
We just had a period of no wind and overcast days in Denmark. And this time of year daylight only lasts for about 8½ hours.
As a result, electricity prices set a new record. At peak my price per kw/h was 22 times higher than it was in the summer. Twenty two times.
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
Cheap when the sun is shining during the day.
wk_end 3 hours ago [-]
Wind is a thing, batteries are a thing, hydro is a thing...
Maybe all that's still not going to cover you in all cases, but...I'm not anti-nuclear by any means, but my understanding is that the upfront costs are very high and take a long time to recoup even in the best of cases. If it's only used as a backup for when cheaper renewable energy can't be generated or bought I'm not sure if the economics will ever work out anymore.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
There's a different between "a thing" and a complete system.
They're still expanding hydro in China because they can tell 2 million people to take a hike and there is nothing they can do about it. I remember reading about how the Glen Canyon dam was going to silt up in 40 years or so back in 1990 and... it did!
A real price for solar energy when you consider batteries for overnight/Dunkelflaut and overbuilding for winter could be 2-3x what people are quoting now... Right about in AP1000 territory.
And yeah, what will really happen is that energy markets will be built around the need of gas turbine peakers who will wind up making almost all the profit in electricity generation even if they are only making 1% of it. By 2050 renewables might be seen as a failed technology the way nuclear was circa 1990, but it might not matter much because India will have a heat event that causes a few million mass causalities and they might decide to use their nuclear weapons to put an end to the fossil fuel age.
georgemcbay 3 hours ago [-]
The claim being made wasn't that nuclear power is universally popular, just that it is way more popular than datacenters.
People (in the US anyway, ymmv elsewhere) really, really hate datacenters and just vaguely distrust nuclear power (without a lot of conviction).
dsr_ 3 hours ago [-]
... People don't pay directly for either nuclear power plants or datacenters. The closest they come to affecting this is by passing and enforcing zoning regulations.
In any case, most of us would rather have one beating than six, but that doesn't mean we want one beating.
northman84 50 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
mbgerring 31 minutes ago [-]
The good news is that plenty of people and companies have been working the problem of upgrading the US electrical grid for more than a decade before this, and all it would take is a small amount of permitting reform and a fraction of the capital deployed for the AI buildout. Plus you get reduced CO2 emissions for free, especially if we wait for the next Congress to do permitting reform.
daishi55 29 minutes ago [-]
All such headlines of this formula “x phenomenon disproportionately affects poor people” always shy away from naming the real problem.
The real problem has nothing to do with datacenters. The problem is that in our capitalist society, money equals political influence. So, these negative externalities get put on the people least able to buy political influence. It’s so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to say it out loud, but that’s what it is.
So don’t whine about data centers unless you are seriously ready to do something about capitalism. I’ll be right there with you when you get to that point.
innocent_name 2 hours ago [-]
I love how America's first intuition when a booming technology/industry appears is to racketeer as much as possible until it dies. My favorite quote:
>California hasn't built its bullet train because the state has required 130,000 pages of environmental reports, making absurd demands like:
• counting bumblebees one by one
• rebuilding woodrat stick huts
• hiring specialized dogs to sniff lizard scat
jonhohle 2 hours ago [-]
I’m lucky enough (/s) to have a regulated, for-profit power company as the only option for electricity. They made $430M in profit this past year and are asking the corporation commission to raise our rates “only” 14% this year. Meanwhile, the cost of electricity they pay to purchase from residential solar is approaching zero.
2 hours ago [-]
josefritzishere 3 hours ago [-]
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pseudonimous-pr 3 hours ago [-]
Here's an interesting coincidence. During 2010-2023, data centers growth was all in crypto farms, a truly ridiculous massive waste of energy. However, that growth played against the West. It diverted capital into ruinous tulip bubbles. It created an alternative to the Western-led financial system and trivialized bypassing sanctions. Yet it got fairly little mainstream coverage.
Now there's a tech race. Data centers are a necessary evil for the West to win it. And suddenly they're getting massive negative coverage. Just today I saw articles about both the far left and far right prioritizing the issue.
dbt00 2 hours ago [-]
At first blush I'd say the difference in data center growth is significant between the two events, plus there's a much more massive capital inflow to AI datacenters, plus crypto has obvious other things to rail against before you get to noise and water impact.
I'd want to see a lot more evidence for an actual conspiracy than this.
pseudonimous-pr 1 hours ago [-]
I asked a chatbot to compare the energy expended in mining Bitcoin and on generative AI thus far, and it came up with 900 TWh for Bitcoin and 450 TWh for AI. Granted it might be biased in favor of AI.
ACCount39 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that made up issues like water use or waste heat, complete with faked research papers, are being used to push the issue? It does make one suspicious.
There is a lot of the broader anti-AI sentiment, so it's possible that the entire thing is just "people want to hear AI bad, so there's market in saying AI bad" - with media and politicians both recognizing the opportunity. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of it turned out to be coordinated influence campaigns.
mdtancsa 2 hours ago [-]
thats what it kinda feels like to me. My intuition tells me the average non tech person has a very worried view of the future due to AI-- I mean, what industry out there says their industry has a non zero chance of ending life as we know it! So that in mind, people look for reasons to shore up their concerns. Datacenters = AI, therefore they are bad for all these reasons-- Reasons which could be applied to many industries.
pseudonimous-pr 2 hours ago [-]
I agree with all your points. As with the rest of the anti-AI movement, I think the key is in the likely consequences. Slowing down the buildout and regulating AI in the West won't affect it elsewhere. At best it's tilting at windmills, so I think it's reasonable to suspect the worst.
Congress could fix this problem tomorrow. And in fact there is a bipartisan bill (BAAJA) that would go a long ways (although not all the way) towards fixing it. Now yes even if we fix these policies there would be a time lag on new generation being connected, but there is no reason to leave this problem in place.
Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years. The problem is that capex deployed to serve data centers is being paid for by households, not that it cannot be deployed.
Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear price increase there from data centers.
The bill you cited would fix much of this, but it would do so via provisions forcing data centers to pay for the costs they cause, instead of forcing households to subsidize them.
If your point is “it’s policy,” fine. But the policy causing this is cost allocation, not permitting.
Your comment doesn’t engage with the article’s central finding at all: who pays.
Data centers pay for electricity under the tariffs utilities charge them. To the extent their demand increases wholesale electricity prices, it's the normal consequence of additional demand competing for constrained supply. In no other market is it standard for the person outbidding to also pay for continuing to provide the service to the person who was outbid. The only reason there is much incremental grid cost is because utilities are legally required to continue serving their residential customers. It seems extremely reasonable for residences to share in some of these costs when getting electricity at a significant discount from market price.
The notion that 'households' are paying for data center electricity is just not what is happening. Maybe residences should get discounted electricity, but again this is a policy question and I'm not sure the best use of the marginal federal dollar.
> Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
Investment is not transmission built, I don't see how this disproves the well-documented countrywide transmission delays. If anything, it is an indication that we are transmission bottlenecked.
Even if congress "fixed" this problem tomorrow it would still take years to build the increased capacity (as you note). Since we do essentially have a fixed supply regime the fast buildout of data centers we've seen over the last few years has indeed been the cause of increased power prices. I'll also add that several renewable power generation projects had been in the works and this administration killed them (even paying a lot of money to kill them).
If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.
And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.
The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/84456/Town-Residents-Conce...
we're honestly screwed as a country, funny to see.
The issue isn't how difficult it is to provision new power, it's that no matter how cheap it will be and how unregulated it will be, datacenters will look to 1) skirt environmental law, and 2) arbitrage cheaper areas that end up being forced to split the price to increase production between the dcs and the locals.
Very large consumers should be required to pay for new production when it's obvious that only them benefit from it, there's absolutely no reason to split the bill with the locals, especially when datacenter have close to zero local economic benefits.
There's plenty of reason to leave the problem in place. The current regime is corrupt, and energy scarcity benefits entrenched fossil fuel players who are cozy with the administration.
Congress has up until now given its endorsement to all of this. Will a new Congress care? Time will tell.
https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/rethinking-l...
I agree the permitting process has hindered building in America, but I'm not convinced the current regimes in charge can craft legislation that actually helps people. America keeps voting for something new because the last attempt hasn't changed the status quo.
Is there a source for this?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/united-airlines-ceo-...
but generally loud gas turbines (don't have to have jet engine lineage)
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
From the people I talk with, the data centers are not a problem in themselves. It is the irresponsibility around them that is the problem.
I haven't read it, and I do support some level of expediency with grid buildout, but it sounds like it opens the door to ruining cultural landmarks, no prevention of abuse for fossil fuel purposes. Finally, and I mean this honestly: If the administration supports it, it probably is something worth pausing to consider.
They have too much power? On their land?
Separately, Here is their objections for anyone interested
https://narf.org/baaja-reform-bill/
It's not their sovereign land, except in the sense that the entirety of the US is 'their land.' Tribes are sovereign over their own land and BAJAA does not change that. It is common for tribes to litigate things outside of their own lands and administered by/for the public, for instance this landmark case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation_v._United_States...
What if they only ran the transmission lines behind their eyesore casinos?
I find their methodology misleading, though. They're basically taking the cost of transmission infrastructure upgrades and then assigning the cost of those upgrades proportional to peak energy demand of the customer base, not the cost of the infrastructure upgrade.
So if, for example, they estimate that residential customer demand will grow by 10%, then they suggest residential customers should only be paying for 10% of transmission infrastructure upgrades.
That's not how infrastructure upgrades work, though. Connecting 100,000 new residential addresses and areas can cost more than a couple data centers that are close to the power station.
The problem is they don't have access to, or at least they didn't look very hard, to find the actual data about transmission line upgrades and how much data centers actually pay to get connected. Contrary to what I see in a lot of the comments here, big customers do actually get billed for their infrastructure upgrade costs after utilities do their analyses. This paper is ignoring the utilities' analyses and substitutes their own highly simplified proportional-to-peak-demand estimates, and that's how they get their headline number.
One very surprising discovery was that they show data center construction incentives to actually be a good deal:
> State incentives for data centers have provided returns on the investments, if inconsistently, the researchers found. Some states, such as California, reaped $180 in worker income for every dollar spent, while Virginia increased income $2 for every dollar invested. The researchers determined that the presence of an existing, qualified workforce was a stronger indicator of high returns than the amount of incentive spending.
That's not what I expected to read.
This is a topic where details basically don't matter for public opinion, though, so I'm not sure it matters. It aligns with what people
Both are solvable with politicians who can be held accountable. But, in many locations, they aren't accountable and can only be trusted to do what's in the interest of their largest donors.
That's all ignoring the various other externalities... aesthetics, noise, pollution.
But, 100%, if a county/town has an underutilized industrial zone, they should build data centers there. But, it also appears data center developers prefer undeveloped plots. Again, also solvable, but somebody needs to do so.
Because if you're asking for them to refocus from data centers to corrupt politicians, I can confidently predict the outcome, and I believe so can you.
In Aus, when anyone makes an application to connect to the electricity network, you get charged for ALL upstream upgrades to service your load. That might mean new powerlines, new substations upstream etc. That both shifts the load onto the DC operator AND moves them to areas where spare capacity is available.
Similar thing applies for a water connection.
Datacentres still technically drive up spot price for electricity but with the amount of new generation coming online that will even out over time. We're building DCs like crazy here and the average spot price is actually falling.
Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place", you're truly left only with noise pollution, which is workable to deal with and its costs can in fact be taken by developer. Hell, existing industrial zones or ex-factory land is normally preferred elsewhere.
It really is a bizarre place to live... it's both the richest nation in the world, but also uniquely broken in many really sad and confusing ways.
Pretty sure unlimited campaign spending (much of it without attribution via dark money) is a major contributor. While not legally bribery, it sure does look like a duck. Not to mention the actual bribery (747s and weddings for Trump being the most obvious examples).
A lot of the problems can't happen in popular datacenter-buildout areas in Poland because the local government cannot change anything about taxes nor can it give any sort of tax break and the most sweetheart deal thing you could pull is water pricing and that is also hard to sell. Nationwide rules set which government levels get what part of the taxes levied on the datacenter, and because of how what USA would call "property taxes" are calculated, there's considerable pressure for owner of the DC to get paying tenants to pay for them.
Even at maximum imaginable tax "optimization", a DC is one of the best RoI things a local government can have in Poland
The US has a corruption problem, which is not exceptional - I don't know what place you're comparing the US to that doesn't give the rich money and the right of way where and when they want.
People say it's a "race to the bottom" without realizing what that implies. It implies that data centers will simply get deals in localities that will not benefit from data centers if other places demand that they at least pay for themselves. Why would that happen? It happens because it will personally benefit the people who have been charged with making the decision.
> Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place"
Again, compared to who? You think they'll have an easier time in Europe? You think if they want to build them in Peru that the residents will benefit?
Note, I am saying specifically on this topic, I am not saying there are no other kinds of grift available.
But I have done recently a deep dive and for example in Poland, especially in the area around Warsaw, a high power datacenter is literally one of the best investments you can get, and the only real issue is to force the builder to use certain noise abatement technologies to deal with the low-frequency noise.
And while it's a race to the bottom, that does not mean that there are no other variables than price - for example, outside of AI, a large boom in EU datacenter space is due to DORA and NIS2 regulations that place certain requirements on locality and resilience
EDIT in response to the below comment, since I've been throttled:
Noise and heat are outputs of datacenters.
Noise requires certain extra investment at building time but can be very much mitigated below 40dB. At mid-scales (12~15 MW usable power) you can have a datacenter pretty much beside residential building and it will be the quieter one.
You need a coordinated policy to encourage everyone to tax them extra, or to require them to put down money for new electrical infrastructure or so on before they break ground. It would be good to have federal action on that.
Data centers require very little personnel to operate. It chugs a ton of water and electricity while polluting acoustically the surrounding area and basically bringing no jobs
Edge compute should be a federal build out IMO. It is considered a matter of national security, right? I could be wrong, so I'm open to discussion.
We build data centers everywhere of all sizes and shapes, they’re part of US Dept of Energy. Companies and individuals can operate them, plug into them like self-storage unit business model.
They would be powered by advanced nuclear, solar, etc. with loads of build out across the country (energy transmission, maintenance, etc.).
Why do we need to have power generation at the source (yes, it is cheaper), when we could do a large scale jobs and infrastructure project out of it that would keep folks employed for GENERATIONS! The demand never ends.
It might open up a lot of opportunities to have that level of localized edge compute, and historically speaking our computing and energy requirements have only ever grown. Give as many people (and communities) a stake into the future!
Private businesses benefit, since they build new things on top of this infrastructure. People benefit, because maintaining the infrastructure is a cost that's rolled in. Everyone benefits from it directly or indirectly (end users).
US Gov could print $1T+ bonds for this, and they would actually pay out in far more ways IMO.
They would and they should and that's efficient and good. The problem is corruption. If I go to a sandwich shop and tell them that $12 for a ham sandwich is too high, I can go from sandwich shop to sandwich shop, and eventually I will find one at a quality I can tolerate at a price I'm willing to pay (let's say $6.)
But with these corporations and billionaires, we assume that if we ask them to pay $12 for a ham sandwich, or even $6, they'll keep moving until they find a shop that will pay them $12 to take a sandwich. It's simply corruption. What they do is the equivalent of paying the cashier $3 to give them the sandwich and $12 from the till. They're shopping for the cashier that is willing to do it.
But that's not how it rolls. At least around me, there instead seems to be a pattern of cities and counties of giving datacenter builds tax abatements of multiple decades in length.
And unlike something like a hospital or a steel mill or even a warehouse: After the local service industry and trades boom from the initial construction is over with, there's not much else coming out of these places. They don't provide very much in the form of long-term employment positions.
And beyond that, it's not like we know what the shape of information technology will be 30 years from now. It's certainly shaped very differently today than it was in 1996.
(And yeah, I know. If there were no tax incentives for datacenters in Location A, then they'd just build them in Location B instead. I don't have a problem with this at all, but some folks seem to find that result to be fundamentally unconscionable.)
> Data center revenue has also enabled the Board of Supervisors to fund the needs of Loudoun County Public Schools, including funding budget increases for the schools amounting to tens of millions of dollars year-over-year. This revenue source has also enabled Loudoun County to meet the public safety needs of the community, funding resources for the Sheriff’s Office and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue. Revenue from data centers has also funded many programs and services provided by Loudoun County to the community, including libraries, parks, recreation and community centers, and critical services in the areas of child protection and mental health. The Board of Supervisors has also funded capital improvements, such as schools, roads, bridges, and a broad range of facilities. All of these expenditures were made possible while simultaneously lowering the real property tax rate for homeowners.
https://www.loudoun.gov/6409/Tax-Revenues-County-Budget
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/new-albany/new-albany-...
Markets based on supply and demand all work like this. Increased demand results in the market price increasing.
Electricity demand eventually becomes fuel demand, which has the same thing: more demand results in increased prices for fuel. Since fuels are broadly substitutable in electricity generation, all fuels increase in price when there's (significant) additional demand for electricity and that tends to increase prices of everything with a significant energy component.
Supply capacity improvements are incentivized by this price increase.
(If the incentive to improve supply capacity were present at the current price level, then those improvements would already be underway regardless of whether the world had ever seen a datacenter or not.)
Last time I went to Costco, I parked over by the edge of the lot by fences with single-family homes behind them.
It was a busy time of day, but it seemed quiet enough. I remember thinking to myself, "Self, if I lived there, then the first thing I'd do is install a gate in that fence so I could just walk over to Costco."
And I've certainly lived in much noisier neighborhoods with far fewer opportunities to walk around and conduct commerce. I'll take the noise of Costco parking lot traffic over that of a congested 5-way city intersection any day.
Living on a steady diet of $1.50 all-beef hot dogs (with a Coke (with refill!)) probably wouldn't be the healthiest way, but I think I'd find a balance somehow.
You need to have a much more honest take than this and mention the real downsides if you’re going to say you’ll do it.
The road does calm down late at night, and then the grain trucks begin roaring again promptly at 0400. The trains only sleep on holidays.
And yet: I've resided in noisier places than even this.
Living right next to a Costco and being able to walk over for a hot dog sounds like a fucking dreamscape by comparison and this is a comparison that I feel I'm qualified to make.
And, sure: Costco isn't everything, and I often want only one can of crushed tomatoes today -- not 12.
But adjacent to the parking lot of the same Costco I was referring to earlier is a nice medium-sized grocery store. There's a coffee shop on the corner. A little further out is a Home Depot and an Asian market, along with quick access to an interstate highway for the things that the neighborhood doesn't provide for.
What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in. Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made. I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
My city has had issues with data centers since prior to the whole LLM craze.
The reason? They gave them tax breaks, and later on the town discovered they employ almost nobody. For the amount of land they took up, they give very little back to the community - both in taxes and in employment. It's understandable that residents would prefer the land be used for just about anything else. Even a pollution generating plant.
It's about more than money. People live in rural areas for reasons and data centers are rather antithetical to them.
If you want to know details, listen to those people
Understand that if the data center developers had not been so cartoonishly exploitative in their deal making in these municipalities nationwide, there really wouldn't be that much pushback. NIMBY stuff ultimately gets built all the time, usually because the money offered is just too good. Instead of using their massive amounts of capital, they struck backroom deals with local politicians to get tax credits, pass along infrastructure costs to other parties, and otherwise financially burden the community.
They had the money to go in and do all of this stuff without involving the public beyond the usual permitting processes; they just thought themselves too important to be burdened with having to spend money to make money. It's the "cult of the founder" mindset in action at the infrastructure policy level.
Is it though? Maybe the construction itself but after that running a data center doesn't need that many on-premise people, like it can be in the two digit range which is not a lot at all. And even then on-premise people won't be the highest paid engineer jobs but rather security and technicians.
During normal operations though, you would have a handful of technicians, probably a facilities manager and frequent contractor visits, probably onsite security.
The facilities contractors may come from far away for maintenance projects, so maybe you help support local hospitality businesses.
Most of the highly paid work at the datacenter will happen remotely.
Every so often, there will be a hardware refresh, but you probably bring in people from elsewhere to do those, if it doesn't make sense to have the onsite techs do it little by little.
Certainly, there's a lot of equipment installed, and any locality with property tax on business equipment should get value from that. But otherwise, almost any other light industrial business would have more employees.
Data centers simply don't require very many people to operate.
Well, that's not the plan. The plan is massive tax cut, infrastructure built with public money and... that's it!
In that case, the accurate analogy would be: Our kids will look back and wonder why we haven't built many more of them.
Not all buildings are built or powered the same way in all countries based on the weather of their location.
American lenses about American Datacenters will be about whats happening in America, not other places.
Rates aren't going up because of datacenters. They are going up because no investment has been made for more than 15 years, and we have been offsetting the "crunch" with creative workarounds.
I remember earlier this year somebody posted the results of a large survey that concluded most people would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center. Of course everybody would rather have nuclear power plant in their backyard because then they get cheap, clean, reliable electricity. They get nothing from the data center except competition for basic utilities.
I also remember how the person couldn't believe the results and found them astonishing. WTF. This just reinforced for me how so many people in technology are either narcissistic, short sighted (exceptionally naive), or have some sort of qualified mental health defect.
Jobs in places where there usually aren't any. Some of these places are nearly dead or dying towns/communities and they're getting a huge jolt of new economic activity. Once the data centers are built there will be a steady base of new workers/jobs to maintain them.
DCs need some guards, some highly trained technicians, and that's mostly it, right? maybe 20-30 jobs per? That's not exactly opening up a new major employer like a factory or steel mill.
If you're facing local protests, my suggestion is offer to fund their schools for 5 years with a bond or something like that. Put the company name on a new power plant. It won't take up most of the cost of building and it'll probably get town hall to approve the zoning for you.
They aren't building steel mills or factories in too many places these days - why do people keep comparing these to data centers as if it's even an option?
Do they even need the technicians on full time? I feel like those are flown out if something is wrong and otherwise can just monitor remotely?
I'm sure they pull in from outside the area for large jobs like major equipment refreshes or major network changes. But for day to day stuff (and there's always day to day stuff), it's just a couple people. Some days, they're very busy and my lowpri tickets take a long time to get worked, other days my tickets get completed in minutes.
I know some companies are driving towards less intervention with racked hardware and will wait to disturb a rack until several units have failed, but you still need someone to work on those when they hit the threshold. And it's nice to have someone onsite for simple things like replacing a failing cable.
This is the incorrect analysis because it is not what is happening. If you can understand this, you can start to understand the resistance. Data centers are a tangible proxy to Ai and the Oligarchy. They look like the globalization, financialization, and deregulation that wrecked the economies they had prior - on steroids.
my understanding is that there are cases where it is not as bad, but by and large - and through history (corporate tax break attractions) - this has not been the case, outcomes are very situational
A lot:
> Data center revenue has also enabled the Board of Supervisors to fund the needs of Loudoun County Public Schools, including funding budget increases for the schools amounting to tens of millions of dollars year-over-year. This revenue source has also enabled Loudoun County to meet the public safety needs of the community, funding resources for the Sheriff’s Office and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue. Revenue from data centers has also funded many programs and services provided by Loudoun County to the community, including libraries, parks, recreation and community centers, and critical services in the areas of child protection and mental health. The Board of Supervisors has also funded capital improvements, such as schools, roads, bridges, and a broad range of facilities. All of these expenditures were made possible while simultaneously lowering the real property tax rate for homeowners.
https://www.loudoun.gov/6409/Tax-Revenues-County-Budget
There's a reason lots of data centers are built around airports (already noisy) or in places that can't support other types of development for some reason.
Many local governments have failed in their responsibility to constituents in approving placement of DCs that should or could have better local projects like housing or retail.
Do you have another argument that doesn't rely on trickle-down economics?
You would never build residential development at the threshold of an airport for obvious reasons. So the remaining options are either leave the land undeveloped and get nothing, or build something that doesn't need quiet to generate tax revenue.
I'm not advocating for or against specific tax agreements because that is between the company and local government, who represent the people.
Oh, and by the way, not that you'd care given your aggressive tone, but US corporate tax rate is about in line with OECD rates: https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-corporat...
You can tell them as much as you want how safe nuclear power is. You may even be right. But after Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, they don't believe you that it will reliably stay safe forever.
As a result, electricity prices set a new record. At peak my price per kw/h was 22 times higher than it was in the summer. Twenty two times.
Maybe all that's still not going to cover you in all cases, but...I'm not anti-nuclear by any means, but my understanding is that the upfront costs are very high and take a long time to recoup even in the best of cases. If it's only used as a backup for when cheaper renewable energy can't be generated or bought I'm not sure if the economics will ever work out anymore.
They're still expanding hydro in China because they can tell 2 million people to take a hike and there is nothing they can do about it. I remember reading about how the Glen Canyon dam was going to silt up in 40 years or so back in 1990 and... it did!
A real price for solar energy when you consider batteries for overnight/Dunkelflaut and overbuilding for winter could be 2-3x what people are quoting now... Right about in AP1000 territory.
And yeah, what will really happen is that energy markets will be built around the need of gas turbine peakers who will wind up making almost all the profit in electricity generation even if they are only making 1% of it. By 2050 renewables might be seen as a failed technology the way nuclear was circa 1990, but it might not matter much because India will have a heat event that causes a few million mass causalities and they might decide to use their nuclear weapons to put an end to the fossil fuel age.
People (in the US anyway, ymmv elsewhere) really, really hate datacenters and just vaguely distrust nuclear power (without a lot of conviction).
In any case, most of us would rather have one beating than six, but that doesn't mean we want one beating.
The real problem has nothing to do with datacenters. The problem is that in our capitalist society, money equals political influence. So, these negative externalities get put on the people least able to buy political influence. It’s so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to say it out loud, but that’s what it is.
So don’t whine about data centers unless you are seriously ready to do something about capitalism. I’ll be right there with you when you get to that point.
>California hasn't built its bullet train because the state has required 130,000 pages of environmental reports, making absurd demands like:
• counting bumblebees one by one • rebuilding woodrat stick huts • hiring specialized dogs to sniff lizard scat
Now there's a tech race. Data centers are a necessary evil for the West to win it. And suddenly they're getting massive negative coverage. Just today I saw articles about both the far left and far right prioritizing the issue.
I'd want to see a lot more evidence for an actual conspiracy than this.
There is a lot of the broader anti-AI sentiment, so it's possible that the entire thing is just "people want to hear AI bad, so there's market in saying AI bad" - with media and politicians both recognizing the opportunity. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of it turned out to be coordinated influence campaigns.