Italy region: +200% tax on datacenters built in green/agricultural areas

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.

Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.

So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.

As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.

[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.

Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

Italian here: as the first reading, I thought it was an usual decision against progress and technology. But reading the article it seems a good sense rule: Lombardy was one of the most industrialized zones of Europe and now is migrating to a post industrial model. This law should force reusing the old and unused industrial spaces instead that wasting space in agricultural areas.

if we can tolerate latency for AI data centers why not build them in the middle of nowhere with solar panels, huge battery banks, and fiber connections? What am I missing? It is truly doable now though with sodium batteries. It is more expensive sure but it is doable. We need to not subsidize these data centers first though. These things need to pay their full cost including environmental cost.

If they invested a token of the budget into making data centers look beautiful that'd probably reduce the push back by like half.

I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.

This is surely a huge blow to all the hyperscalers looking to build datacenters in the agricultural regions of Italy.

I think that's mostly virtue signaling.

Italy isn't a particularly attractive place to run data centers for different reasons, starting from the very high cost of energy.

Who needs computers, anyways

Good.

I am usually apposed to any tax on anyone or any entity for any reason but I am also jaded after a lifetime of seeing taxes almost entirely go to fraud waste and abuse that only grows with time and very rarely ever shrinks. me and my weird fantasies about implementing the code of bushidō in all governments world wide.

This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.

My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?

> built in green/agricultural areas

So they want them in other areas instead? Like next to residential area?

I'm not sure they understand the implications...

Sure, why not. But if you drop an AI datacenter in the middle of an agricultural area, you won't be able to find it. Because AI datacenters are actually tiny by comparison.

This is the way

I don't understand why they're looking to increase the tax rather than just banning them.

Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.

LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.

There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.

Agricultural areas? After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades, now Europe wants to become an autarky?

As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.)

[0]: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...

EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.