Same thing with data centres in Norway. We're planning to waste heaps of our renewable energy on generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV. For what? Luckily there's been more political pushback against it here recently, but it's so tame. Just for once I'd like to see some conviction. Pause all ongoing constructions, and launch corruption probes into all the local politicians that pushed this stuff through. I bet there's lots of corruption there. On a national level, we don't have corruption on anything near the systemic scale you see in the US. Some bad apples, and lots of mole hills made into mountains by the press, but nothing like the US where it seems like most of congress is pretty much openly corrupt.

Local politicians though? Oh boy. Seems like every time there's some ongoing project in a smaller municipality involving commercial exploitation of natural resources(like undeveloped land, minerals, hydropower capacity, etc) there's a mayor and/or municipal council members who profit from it financially or otherwise. They have shares/board seats in a holding company owning the land, local contractors, etc. Seems like this is very widespread, and rarely leads to serious consequences, and even when it does, it happens so late that the project is already built, or so far underway it doesn't get stopped. Shit pisses me off.

I'm sure data centres are no different. Because I can't imagine a cost-benefit analysis of them that makes any sense from the point of view of the local community.

>generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV.

People say that, but users are the ones capturing most if not almost all of the profit.

You don't cut Anthropic a check every time a new user signs up on your platform. You pay them a small slice of the revenue that their models generate for you.

Like... the town where the Google datacenter goes gets like some paved bike road from Google who "takes care of the community". Price tag around the profits of less than an hour of the GPU time in that datacenter.

An article in Finnish: https://www.uusijuttu.fi/juttu/sCcu9YiY-mjF4UD1O-b66ec