| ▲ | ericcumbee 4 hours ago |
| Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers. The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is. |
|
| ▲ | da_chicken 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. They're all drain. |
| |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora... | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions? The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates. 50% off energy taxes. Reduced property taxes. I could go on. https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo... Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption? | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc. A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less. It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead? |
| |
| ▲ | da_chicken 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, it's exactly the truth: https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a... The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power. | | |
| ▲ | ToValueFunfetti 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd think that the claim >Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken? | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to? |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | joe_the_user 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing. Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these. |
| |
| ▲ | AussieWog93 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room? | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero an hour ago | parent [-] | | That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | ab5tract 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts. |
|
| ▲ | altmanaltman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall. But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes. If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method. |
|
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily. |
| |
| ▲ | locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily. This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you. Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere. Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace. > because someone failed to do PR They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion. | | |
| ▲ | perpetuallunch an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices. The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer. What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve? If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer My understanding is this wasn't done. > What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows. More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow. |
|
| |
| ▲ | kulahan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…) Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4]. The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.) Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem. [1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s [3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... [4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta... | |
| ▲ | DaSHacka 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller. But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs
and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble. Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | lovich 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods. Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
|
|
