alt Hacker NewsA 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.
Replies
>>“- 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”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.
Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
This seems imminently fair to me.
Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.
> The rules he suggests are
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.
I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get built.
> 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
Welcome to NIMBY
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...