It’d basically the same as fracking. No one should have to be subject to noise pollution or water pollution from these things. And they’re an eyesore. Plus it’s not like the incumbent residents share in the wealth of these tech companies.

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rmason 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We need to win in AI and to do that we must have data centers. The solution I believe is for the people building them to get creative.

1. Build them in the industrial part of town. I'm from Michigan, there are neighborhoods in our cities filled with manufacturing firms stamping steel and making all kinds of noise with few houses. Yes the real estate can be more expensive and sometimes needs pollution removed but there are usually willing economic development departments willing to help.

2. Make the data centers bring their own power.

3. Find ways to creatively help the community. Saw pictures of a data center recently where they created two huge public swimming pools that are open all winter long, There is a power plant on Lake Michigan where they heat all the sidewalks. Imagine waking up in the morning and not having to shovel or spread ice before going to work.

4. Find ways to repurpose unwanted buildings. Detroit wants to tear down two of the five towers of the Renaissance Center which is on the Detroit River. One of the towers would have the first two floors occupied by the University of Michigan which would offer training classes on technology to the community. The rest would be a data center for the university. Power would be two gas turbines on the roof. The other tower would be a partnership with Detroit Public Schools that would offer a dormitory for all the school age kids living on the street. Educate these children from 6-18. Most American cities have at least one empty skyscraper that could be repurposed as a vertical data center.

5. Repurpose old shopping centers as data centers. South of the Mason Dixon line where solar has a higher ROI you could cover the entire parking lot with solar cells. You could offer free or nearly free shaded parking, maybe even let campers have extended stays.

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breakingstuff 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It blows my mind that you don't hear more about repurposing old malls and other abandoned large properties as data centers. Also, the fact that hyperscalers don't think more about how their buildings could add more benefit to the community they are in shows just how tone death they are. If they don't change their approach soon, no way capacity is going to catch up to demand.

	▲	pibaker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you don't hear more about repurposing old malls and other abandoned large properties as data centers The building is not the hard part. The hard part is getting enough electricity to run GPUs 24/7. Old malls' electric connections are not powerful enough for that, so you are going to either spend money on new infrastructure anyway, or park a few natural gas turbines in the parking lot.

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tzs 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We need to win in AI and to do that we must have data centers

What exactly do you mean by "win in AI"?

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add-sub-mul-div 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Winning" in AI could mean standing by while other countries race to atrophy the minds of their citizens.

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rapsey 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bring your own power means natural gas turbines or diesel generators. Both of which produce incredible noise pollution.

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bigstrat2003 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> We need to win in AI

No, we do not. There's no prize to be won, nothing of value to be gained.

	▲	Larrikin 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Both sides of this argument have not justified their stance
	▲	moron4hire 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		AI Inevitablism. This is a concerning thing. Folks talk about AI as if it is a forgone conclusion. But it has yet to be demonstrated. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place right now. I work at a company that claims its people are the source of its great work output, yet the key stakeholders for my particular project are constantly beating the "AI, use AI" drum. I've been trying to design a product that enhances our analysts abilities. A middle ground where the subject matter experts use AI to do the boring, manual labor kind of work that doesn't enrich anyone and just leads to our organization burning out junior analysts with overtime they'll never get compensated for. But my stakeholders keep beating that drum. "AI can do this work from front to back." To be clear, it can't. We've done the research to figure out that any sense that an LLM applied to the kind of work we do is only a dilettantism. It looks good if you are skimming the output, but drilling down deep there are massive problems. But that story, "AI is good now. What did you try last year? What model did you use? It can do so much now." Is pernicious. First of all, the models today I don't see producing anything functionally better; they just dress it up in better language. Second, that's not an actionable software engineering plan! "Oh, just wait a year, the AI will get better". Sure, it gets better at not completely shitting the bed before you coax it into doing a particular job. But it hasn't been getting better at being actually insightful, actually delivering on what our people with very deep experience can do just by rote, just by asking them, "what do you think of <insert competitor>'s capacity to deliver X compared to our ability to do same?" I feel like I'm living in crazytown. I evaluate AI capability much more than what my stakeholders do and they keep telling me "more AI!" If it weren't for my mortgage and my kids and my junior devs I'm desperately trying to protect, I would have quit months ago.

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gruez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That goes for like, most infrastructure? Who would want a dump or nuclear power plant in their backyard?

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jkmcf 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Technically people do benefit from having a dump or power plant.

Very few people are affected by having a dump nearby or a nuclear power plant, whereas it seems like the power generators for these AI data centers really belong in an industrial park.

These data centers also don't employ many people, though I've read they are wonderful for city taxes, assuming they haven't gotten too many enticing tax breaks.

	▲	gruez 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Technically people do benefit from having a dump or power plant. They also benefit from an AI datacenter, at least as evidenced by how many installs the chatgpt app has. >Very few people are affected by having a dump nearby or a nuclear power plant, whereas it seems like the power generators for these AI data centers really belong in an industrial park. Something tells me the anti-datacenter activists won't be placated by moving a block or two away from residential zones. >These data centers also don't employ many people, though I've read they are wonderful for city taxes, assuming they haven't gotten too many enticing tax breaks. And dumps do?

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tzs 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretty much nobody, but dumps and nuclear power plants are in the same category as things like airports and sewage treatment plants that provide services that are largely used in the area the service provider is in. You may not like a dump nearby, but hey, your area needs those services and the providers have to be in the area, and at least a dump is better than a sewage treatment plant.

AI data centers are not in that category. Nothing AI is going to do (good or bad) for 99.9% of people requires that the data center that AI is running in is in the same area, or even the same state. It just needs to be somewhere where the internet latency between them and the data center is not too high for whatever they are using the AI for.

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ungreased0675 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ll take the nuclear power plant, as long as I’m far enough away to not hear anything from it.

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zbrozek 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Folks don't want anything built near them ever. Even if it's as benign as housing.

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bpodgursky 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The data centers will thus provide 45 percent of the nearly $2.9 billion in county tax revenue. For perspective, that means that the money they generate exceeds what Loudoun spends on every county function outside the school system. In effect, local police, courts, jails, fire and rescue, libraries, parks, animal control, and social services are funded without burdening residents.

-- Loudoun County, Virginia

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rmason 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Heard an interview with the former head of Loudoun County who is now an evangelist for the data center industry. They got the county completely out of debt. They tripled the amount they spent on parks and art. But the kicker was the fact they have a $1 billion dollars in their rainy day fund! The data centers are all located in four townships out of sixteen in the county.

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shoopadoop 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And so what, if the datacenters render the place uninhabitable? Even if its budget is in the black the county sounds awful to live in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAliBRyq_1c

Look how close all these shrieking buildings are to residential areas.

	▲	bpodgursky 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Look at Loudon County VA on satellite view. This county has the largest data center concentration on earth. Can you see them? Be honest. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Loudoun+County,+VA/@39.114...

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jmyeet 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are lots of reasons you can oppose fracking BUT oil wells are generally built on pretty low value land eg West Texas and the Dakotas. Also, fracking creates a lot of jobs. Plus the landowner (often farmers or ranchers) will typically get royalties on the amount of oil pumped.

There have been a lot of sins committed by the oil industry, like in Texas there are lot of leaking, "orphan" wells where nobody ended up being responsible for capping the well and doing the clean up. This goes back to the 1950s and earlier. I think things are somewhat better now.

There's literally zero upside to a community to building a data center. Electricity costs go up, there's noise pollution, there are no jobs, water rates go up and there is water pollution.

Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

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Game_Ender 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A functioning property tax brings in a lot of revenue for the local government. Areas of the US with lots of data centers, like Loudon County, can have 35% of their budgets covered by data centers, and the worst of it is so ugly big box buildings you drive by sometimes.

Put in place sensible rules around noise, locating in pre-planned areas, and covering the cost for electrical upgrades then let the market decide how many to build. Most people appear to be getting their information from TikTok and have developed a very ignorant NIMBY attitude.

To be blunt progress does get made by listening solely to those who get short end of the stick. Japan and China have good rail in large part because the central government can simply make the globally better choice over the objections of those nearby who lose out due to noise and other factors. We don’t need to do that, we simply need to not let ignorance win and instead regulate the externalities properly, and capture value for the public through property taxes.

	▲	jmyeet 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"let the market decide" means "let the billionaires decide" and they have. They've decided they don't care about public opinion and are more than happy to push all the infrastructure costs, pollutions and externalities onto everybody else. Take Kevin O'Leary's DC. Massive energy tariff credits and propetty tax deductions and it uses more power than the rest of the state. So there'll need to be electrical infrastructure upgrades to get in gigawatts of electricity. You think Kevin O'Leary is paying for that? Of course not. Utah residents will be paying for that. The blatant lies around tax breaks and subsidies are funny too. "we have to hand them out or they'll go elsewhere". No, no they won't. And if they do, who cares? Most things in life are a collection of positives and negatives. Like someone else mentioned fracking. It definitely has a lot of negatives but (IMHO) it's way more positive than data centers. I actually think AI data centers are strictly negative, meaning they have zero positives for the state and the communities affected. I honestly cannot think of a single positive that the residents of Utah will get out of Kevin O'Leary's DC.

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ramblenode 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.