> provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.

Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.

This water usage meme needs to die. Although, it is nice to have an indicator for people who believe whatever they told without trivial verification.

I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.

Welcomed by corrupt politicians perhaps the locals not so much.

Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.

Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor.

Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.

It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.

It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.

This is the last stand for Satya Narayana Nadella Copilot has to work…

Water is a renewable resource. It actually is infinite if youre just using it to cool a datacenter, it does not disappear when youre done with it.

Libertarians turn super-woke when white privilege keeps them from doing what they want to do when they want to do it. The bad thing about just being able to steal from the blacks is that the blacks don't have anything to steal anymore.

Not being able to steal from whites as easily as you can steal from blacks is literally white supremacy actually, so to be a good ally everybody has to let Microsoft build a datacenter in their backyard. YIMBYs rule!