alt Hacker NewsSome of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
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> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?