alt Hacker NewsBingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are. Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after they’re built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water, air pollution if it’s self-powered, noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,) ugly… the only local entities that win are the landowner and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience doing it elsewhere.
The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.
Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.
Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
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Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,)
Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong, among other issues).
- Datacenters don't use tons of water compared to just about any other business.
- It's not really fair to blame datacenters for using the municipality's electricity and then blame them again for being loud and generating electricity instead of using the municipality's electricity. Any given datacenter is only doing one of these.
- Presumably, the municipality's tax dollars benefit the people who live in the municipality in the form of better services
Doesn't this also apply to new housing? Strain on services per job created is probably even higher. The benefits are for someone currently not living here, just like data centers used for remote users. And if cheaper housing is available obnoxious poor people might move in. I think there should be a moratorium. Not in my backyard!
> Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers
My national government is currently giving massive tax breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...
This thread is obviously being brigaded. Wiped out like 30 upvotes on one comment in no time. If you need to silence people talking about your company or favorite toy, maybe you should re-examine your life choices. Pathetic. Is there some polymarket nonsense going on here?
> Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.
They really shouldn't be.
There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives, at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.
But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to remove any regulation instead.