alt Hacker NewsWhat I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
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They can, surely, but I presume that in some cases there's a lack of preexisting regulation on land use and on others politicians are not properly representing the interests of their constituency.
It seems that e.g. OpenAI is mostly power constrained. To go to the middle of nowhere would mean also basically no power grid to speak off?
It's difficult getting a grid connection and fiber optic uplinks in the middle of nowhere.
There is a bunch of relativly big cities even in the arctic circle.
Murmansk (population 295,374) Russia; Norilsk (178,018) in Russia; Tromsø (75,638) in Norway; Vorkuta (58,133) in Russia; Bodø (52,357) Norway; Harstad (24,703) in Norway; Kiruna, Sweden (22,841)
Datacenters need a source of water, and human populations are usually concentrated in those places too for the same reason.
Because they need the local infrastructure to support them, which would be difficult and expensive to reproduce out in the middle of nowhere.