Data center politics

Finance
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Continuing the discussion from Artificial intelligence—economic and investment implications:

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Continuing what discussion? That linked thread was started 2 days ago and has one post, and you adding nothing to this thread besides the link. I’m confused.

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Haha, I’ll start.

Clearly there’s a huge demand for data centers, but also a huge backlash from the communities where they’re being built. The justifications I’ve seen:

  • Water usage. Drinking water used for cooling, then dumped. Some places, like CA, are in a perpetual drought. Lake Mead is at the lowest level ever. Vegas keeps expanding, CA wastes half the water to grow alfalfa to feed the cows. A lot of stupid things being done with clean water.
  • Water pollution from dumping toxic waste. Examples with both Facebook and Tesla.
  • Noise pollution. Many videos online with unbearable and often illegally high noise levels during day and night. Long term exposure leads to worse sleep and all kinds of illnesses.
  • Increased energy demand leads to higher energy prices for the residents. Saw a headline recently where some governing body (don’t remember the details) proposed a law to ensure that data centers guarantee all the costs up front (including any necessary infrastructure upgrades), and ensure that residential rates don’t go up.

Erin Brokovich (yes, that one) launched a site to track all the data centers and keep track of complaints I guess:

When the local governments turn a blind eye to the needs of their residents, I guess it’s politics. But what is there to discuss other than how shitty this is?

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Part of the issue I suspect is that data centers need relatively few staff / jobs compared to their value, hardware and power costs. So the local economy impacts might be modest or even negative while the gains accrue to some big company and their global users elsewhere.

Different politics than bringing a car factory to town or something.

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Moderators, please put this thread in my artificial intelligence thread.

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These data centers are functionally identical to crypto mining farms. Costly for environment, costs communities economically and environmentally, creates very little value for anyone but the owners.

This should be solvable through local taxes so that communities are at least not financially impacted.