Sounds probably about right in scale. 5-10x more employees per sqft for common industrial or manufacturing businesses.

But local negative impact on community is not remotely comparable to most industrial development. Everything from traffic, noise, pollution, etc. A few bad projects aside, these things are glorified warehouses typically sited in suburban industrial parks or the middle of nowhere.

It all really just comes down to the electricity needs they demand. Otherwise it’s about as close to as free money to a community as you can get.

The most problematic thing to me with this whole deal are local tax abatements. Those should be outright illegal though for any development.

The fact datacenters are standing up extremely expensive on-site natural gas turbines due to the immense delays for interconnect.

Pretty much no facility operator wants to also pay for and operate their own power plant. They are small and expensive to operate compared to combined cycle natural gas or other sources, and lack of access to a wider grid means even more additional expenses like a additional on-site redundancy.

If they could simply pay for grid interconnect that is ready by the time facility construction is completed they would do so, in the vast majority of cases.

The money is in getting things online ASAP. Builders are effectively throwing unlimited buckets of money at all aspects of these builds at people who can get shit done fast. Power interconnect would be no exception.

I think folks have become numb to these huge numbers being thrown around in terms of how large this investment cycle/bubble is. Those numbers mean real things - like operators writing basically blank checks to jump the queue on networking equipment, wiring harnesses, etc. Those in the industry who are not these giant hyperscalers are kind of shut out of everything from cabling, network gear, HVAC, optics, etc. For any price - since our volumes are a joke compared to these huge contracts. There is a reason you see unprecedented margins for every company selling critical parts and equipment for these builds.

Heck, standard power cables have gone up about 8x in cost on us in the past 12mo. It’s been crazy to watch and hear from suppliers how they give insane quotes to these companies which get approved same-day.

It’s all a giant race, cost is currently not a primary concern if money can be used to speed anything up.

Elon (in)famously put gas turbines on pickup trucks to power the Colossus 1/2 datacenters because connecting to the grid was incredibly slow and there was limited supply. And got sued to remove them.

Absent regulation, every operator would happily do the same thing to make the problem go away.