alt Hacker NewsUS voters roundly reject data centers in ballot measures
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Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
This comment section blows my mind! Are we that insulated from the world? Are these all bots? Am I crazy???
Tech is now viewed in the same lense as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
Anytime I talk to anyone not in tech they're extremely sceptical of anything tech companies do. Most common reasons I hear as to why is greed, social media destroying children in many ways, seeking political power, and now many parents are concerned their child won't have critical thinking skills because AI is here to think for them.
I don't think they're crazy or obviously wrong. It breaks my heart to hear tech leaders chalk this all up to "AI has poor messaging" as if you say "Our lies have got to be better so we can make the public believe what we want". I've never seen tech so out of touch.
The literal pitch these guys have been using is:
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
Did they reject data centers? Or did they represent the current ownership model behind data centers?
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
Just policy thinking out loud.
There are a set of data centers that got built where local laws were (and continue to be) broken. Messaging from the data center builders is that accepting their will is inevitable and they are above regulation. Given these, it is an entirely reasonable position to ask for a complete halt.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
The fact that Americans can be made to vote for NIMBY policies was well known. My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
If you don’t give people buttons to say no to AI, they will use ballots instead.
Any hope of a bailout for AI or data centers vaporized last night. If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.
AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, META are all up 3 - 7%! Huh.
NVDA is down a couple %, ORCL is mostly flat. It’s the neoclouds that have taken the most beating, down 10%+
I wonder if people know who the data centers are for…
I saw first hand the Port Washington, Wisconsin data center build and spoke to a guy working on the project. As he points out, the pay is the best he's ever had, but as construction is always boom and bust, he was under no illusion that it would last forever.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
That's what happens when you are building something too fast and affects negativity the local economy. I personal doubt this data centres are really the issue. But we got what we paid for.
I'm all for data centers so long as they pay market rates for water and electricity.
Winners from this off the top of my head...
- Every existing data center just became much more valuable
- If "data centers in space" actually work then their value just grew significantly
Getting people to vote against building anything is easy, of course when people start complaining about lack of housing, or a failing economy its quite a bit more challenging for them to recognize how regulation (that they may have voted for) led to those issues.
Are those same voters going to roundly reject steel mills or semiconductor fabs, which have a similar land/water/electricity footprint?
A lot of noise, pollution, resource usage, power sound problems etc can be easily solved. The one that I think people are frustrated is the wealth inequality and data centers are directly seen as making few people insanely rich while their lives are not improving whatsoever. I don't see a solution to this yet.
We had a clown running in our local election who had "no data centers" on their election signs. The area they were running to control is the last place you would ever want to put a data center. This clown won. Politicians use this to fool stupid people.
Data centers are the way of the future. We can either embrace them or fall behind places like China. I definitely think they should pay their own way 100%, but for God's sake, look at the big picture. Everyone uses AI in some way or another every day.
What is sad is we've been building data centers for decades without problems.
Some near me have wetlands around them and the houses bordering them are very desirable.
Seems like some bad apples ruined it for everyone.
Has anyone done an analysis of how these laws are defining "data center"? Anyone accidentally ban having a rack of servers on an office closet? That could suck for a lot of small businesses. I'm all for local autonomy, but knee jerk local laws can also be... messy.
And it will all be explained away and get roundly ignored.
its going to bring a fraction of the jobs they are projecting. and just most jobs will be temp/ contract just to build the damn thing. after its built it 90%+ related to the project will be out of job and likely leave your town (best case)
I bet if AI actually starts making visible-to-patient progress in curing diseases, data centers will be welcome with open arms.
You know who has a lot of power / space / water?
Private compounds owned by billionaires who believe data centers are the best. Seems to me, they already have a solution to their problem.
The sad reality is neither sides' politicians care. Conservatives opened the doors for the elitists, now the liberals come in and close the door behind them, ensuring no other competitors get in. This "Dems vs Reps" opposition portrayed in the media is really just a clandestine partnership. And the general public falls for it every time.
They’re probably inevitable anyway. Nobody likes to live near any kind of industry. For me as a kid that was dairy farms. Fucking horrible. Nobody lining up to close them down though. Hog farms are also terrible. Chickens I can imagine too, never seen one personally though.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
Bad news for the rest of the world, because you all will export this problem to us.
are data centers profitable, or are there currently a ton of hopes and dreams filled by outrageous investments that will bring down the economy if/when the bubble bursts? i am worried that it's the latter, but i have no clue and it feels too stupid to be true. are they actually making a profit?
Anything with a whiff of data centers were squashed. Here in Rhode Island there were rumors that the economic development ballot question was so vague that it could end up being a data center.
Related:
Data Centers on the Ballot
https://datacentersontheballot.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361608)
Good
Drake No: datacenters
Drake Yes: Green compute sanctuaries
Bet me this isn’t just going to be a PR issue.
So much money lost by Musk and co! Love it! The people always have more power than a few rich people.
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US voters will do absolutely anything but stop using the apps and technology from Big Tech that are powered by these data centers. It's always hilarious when someone shows me a Reel or TikTok about how they hate data centers. Often, they will also send off an AI response on why data centers are problematic. They are completely oblivious or knowingly ignorant.
Of course, the US is fully of NIMBYs on all fronts. Housing, progress, infrastructure.
In my local area, there's routinely local opposition to substations built due to growing residential demand and water infrastructure facility build.
They're old boomers who don't want anything built, especially not if it will economically benefit their children.
A lot of people here are portraying the opposition to data centers as being uneducated hypocrites who are against anything getting built. When you look at what the opposition are saying, they generally know what they are talking about. Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.