Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity.
You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.
The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.
They keep negotiating payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to dodge fair tax rates and grab special treatment, so we do see a loss in value there over decade(s) in many cases.
Sure, there’s plenty of places where you could plausibly build a data center, so the leverage that localities have to insist on high tax rates is limited.
If the factory in Tennessee is its own legal entity and the sales office is in another (it’s a group) then yes transfer pricing is used where the goal is to use the market price of an arm length distance (what would you pay for the factory/data center if it was someone unrelated to you) and if same company (guess more uncommon) you use formulas to allocate where value is created and where taxes should be paid.
Why does the local community need their take from that economic activity? What are they even providing? Are they providing land, electricity, and hardware for free to the data center?
If human activity is taxed, AI activity will be taxed. It's just inevitable. It will be taxed at multiple levels until we figure out the right level to do so. Some of it will be detrimental to AI development but that's normal - in Canada we had a hidden manufacturing sales tax until the 80s which made exports more expensive.
A technology that puts X% of people out of work is going to be taxed.
The factory comparison is a moot point. This isn't about taxation.
Do you think the people hysterically screaming about a data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory?
We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use less energy than traditional factories and less water than golf courses). These are all solved problems.
The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning in secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately. The doomsday religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria given their end times prophecy did not come true. No amount of tax money will provide the same level of meaning as LARPing as an activist fighting in defense of an abstract fragile god (a femininely delicate "mother earth").
I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.
There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent.
Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.
There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.
Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.
And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.
Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable.
> the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states
What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states would make more sense here. Red states are not impoverished of politics, they just have different politics.
"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing"
Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.
Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?
I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.
Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry.
If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.
It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.
> If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible to address it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being externally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
If "this" was a single new Ford plant, I would imagine that the local population around it would be having a similar conversation.
If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.
The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:
"Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article"
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
Sure, that's a fair point. You're right that I don't have those numbers, and I would be willing to be that at the moment, no one does.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
Wall Street is gonna finance these projects and make their cut wherever the projects ultimately are. NY state is simply ensuring that no concrete batch plant in Oneonta accidentally gets rich along the way too,
To some extent you wonder if this "tapping the brakes" might be saving some companies from themselves. It's likely we're in the overinvestment phase of this technological cycle and that's usually followed by the bust phase where a lot of companies with a lot of debt go under. See The Panic of 1873 and the overbuilding of railroads (and huge debt accumulation) that led to that.
Exactly. Towns are also increasingly nervous that when the bottom drops out of the AI bubble they’ll be left with abandoned half-built data centers blighting their communities.
It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible. The bond market for financing buildouts is looking shaky and even Amazon struggled there in its last go at loaning money to fuel the buildout. That doesn’t bode well for others.
> We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
Let's be honest. There is a way to safely build data centers. Sensible laws could be made for them to build enough solar so they can power themselves or they are responsible for the cost of increasing capacity. Things like environmental impact and pollution need to be taken into account. However, since this is America, that won't happen. So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
> So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
> People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive,
Red states still have a significant population that don't vote Republican and they're more often than not the ones who bear the brunt of negatives like data center construction.
Yeah, I hate this narrative that rural areas are 99% republican maga people. Often they win the vote by at best a few percentage points.
Like how the dnc is surprised when their overzealous and poorly thought out gun control measures are turned down by democratic voters. Of course they are, near 50% of rural areas are democrats and many own and use guns. They aren't going to just bandwagon along with poorly conceived legislation that restricts their actively used rights.
The previous failure was in 2011, and didn't happen again until a decade later. The root cause hasn't been resolved since 2021: the demand and weather conditions simply haven't recurred since.
Yes, it's just tiring to hear the same meme putdowns about how this Winter we're all going to suffer when we probably have less brownouts etc than a lot of other places.
I remember 2011 but I didn't actually have any issues with a power failure it was just extremely icy. These are freak weather events, generally the grid holds up fine. I'm not saying we don't have issues but it is kind o foverblown.
According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.
They only have 12 years of proven natural gas reserves left so you should take up whatever issues you have w/ lack of natural resources w/ mother nature. Most of the new capacity they are planning to build are natural gas & coal plants. Renewables are not reliable enough for data centers.
Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?
If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything. Even on this supposedly 'intellectually-minded' forum the extreme irony flies over the heads of most.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
My town isn't perfect in those terms but it's probably about as good as possible, so yes I would have. Of all the places I've lived, tho, there's certainly lots of thing I would have opposed, given the chance, like all those highways.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.
> One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.
This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.
Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.
So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists.
Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I have some bad news for you.
Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact studies existed caused severe health issues for the surrounding communities, including cancer and death. That's why we have environmental impact studies now.
Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending.
We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?
Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?
Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?
> We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything
These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".
> But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.
> what about Datacenters is uniquely bad
- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts
- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)
- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)
- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife
> Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.
I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.
Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves report" even details a scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply in 2026.
Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.
Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.
Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.
> The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas
Including in-flight projects, that totals several GW. Texas demand today is pretty low for noon - clouds and rain in much of the state, and we're at 70 GW.
Building interconnects costs money. What's the ROI on building more?
Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.
Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?
Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.
Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.
Completely serious. Sea water cooling for data centers is already in use here in Helsinki. And water temperature in the Gulf of America doesn't seem to go above 30 C even in the summer.
Sea water would have to be piped to places like Dallas, whereas much of Finland's people/data centers are closer to the shoreline. A solution that works in certain places does not generally work everywhere.
There's no need to build them in Dallas. Just keep them near the shoreline. The only reason you have so many data centers in North Jersey is so high frequency traders can make their calls 0.02ms before their competitors on the NYSE. For an average user, the 1ms ping between Dallas and Corpus Christi is not a problem.
We have a home in Houston. Over by the big gates down Sunset.
I have no particular objection to building datacenters there.
All that said, I think you're being real hand-wave-y here. The climate in Houston is materially different than it is in Dallas. So there's likely a reason these companies have been locating their enormously expensive assets where they have been locating them.
Houston floods. Often.
Houston gets hit by Hurricanes.
Houston is hot and humid with relatively high ground water tables.
Don't even get me started on the power and the durability issues arising from the use of sea water.
There's a lot to work out there. You put what you can afford to lose in Houston, but you don't bet the farm on coastal Texas. You just can't do that if you want resilient infrastructure.
story about a salt of the earth datacenter operator who manages the datacenter and people while spreading misinformation about the impact of datacenters on people.
Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
The Catskills have those environmental protection laws because they are the water source for NYC. It would be very stupid to relax those to build data centers.
NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change.
Why are people disagreeing? I find it wild that people actually condone putting a solar farm on a state park. That land is supposed to be mostly natural and for public use. If the park wants to power itself using solar, then put it on the roofs and cover the parking areas with panels. Don't contract out a forest/field to be developed as a solar farm.
Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems like city people want to exploit the natural lands to produce their electricity. True NIMBY. It's hard to claim to care about the environment when being willing to destroy it when alternatives exist.
Yeah why do I have to pay to get it in my roof when a solar company will buy land to put up solar cells. Just put it on my roof instead. I won't complain.
That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.
The AI ones are a hundred times larger. Formerly you needed a building to house racks where each customer had a few servers, now they want a megacomplex all dedicated to one purpose. Few of these are even getting completed, most are abandoned for cost reasons.
Oregon has a 1-year moratorium on new data centers qualifying for the state's Enterprise Zone (EZ) property tax incentive programs (as of June 5, 2026. We shouldn't be giving tax incentives to these Data Centers. But it looks like this NY moratorium goes way beyond that to actually stopping construction.
Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.
With datacenters there is a huge amount of ragebait in the news and social media. People are anxious about jobs and reporters and influencers are cashing in on that anxiety by running headlines that imply doom. Datacenters are hugely problematic. But, everywhere I go I see media and commenters exaggerating, implying, assuming, or just making up outrageous claims. But, it's the hot topic right now and outrage drives the clicks that pays the bills. So, ragebait it is.
We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.
The anti-climate change movement has been around well before social media so it is pretty much just ingrained at this point. Anti-datacenter is feeling the influence of social media. So while people are not as motivated by anti-climate change as they are numb to it, the datacenter movement can still gets all of the feels.
Probably but now planning of these datacenters will now include power redundancy and a shit ton of backup power. Some commenters here think "just move dc to texas." Sounds like a good idea until you realize grid is nearly entirely separate from federal grid. State manages it and completely ignores any attempts to weatherize it.
2021 was an absolute disaster. There was a moment where the grid could have completely collapsed. But by some luck, the state avoided that.
Not exactly. Much of the anti-datacenter population got that way from hearing about the irresponsible ones and don't want it happening in their area. If they never heard about it because it was in the middle of nowhere, then they wouldn't be involved. It's NIMBY - data center or houses, don't build it near me.
A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing, I don’t think it’s fair to say they are both coming from the same NIMBY sentiment. Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no
"Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no"
This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.
>A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing,
On the flip side a datacenter never showed up to a town meeting to screech about how my way of life ought to be illegal, how the businesses I patronize ought to be punitively regulated, how I ought to pay more taxes so that the city can do things I don't want done, etc, etc.
And I say this as someone who already lives near a bunch of industrial sites.
Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, this is pretty clumsy regulation that will just cause Tiebout sorting away from NY. If there are negative externalities, tax 'em, use the proceeds for some feel-good social programming, and let the data center builders internalize the costs...
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
New York heavily restricts construction and infrastructure projects of all kinds. The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.
NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of.
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.
Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.
AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.
I consider myself pretty YIMBY, but the data center build outs are definitely starting to catch my eye.
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular.
I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Ny also for as long as I've been here, does not try to have first mover advantage. The state really does usually show up second or third to the party. So to speak.
Too often people forget to mention all the first mover disadvantages. It’s often perfectly fine to wait for things to evolve and join when they are better understood and stabilized. Let the others spend money, political capital, and figure out what works, then eventually join the party, without all the baggage the first movers have accumulated.
Same with AI stuff. No you don’t need to be at the forefront of whatever is happening. No you won’t be left behind if that actually completely revolutionize the world, you can let the others try and fail to integrate LLMs in their systems. When it is eventually proven to boost ROI in a reliable way and AI vendors have actually figured out a reliable business model, it’s actually pretty simple to learn the technology and integrate in your existing infra
why are we talking about bernie sanders in the context of new york state? he's a US senator from vermont. this is state-level politics, not federal, in the state of new york, not vermont. and he's not mentioned once in this article?
This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
> AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
That goes against my personal experience. It's only people in this small tech bubble that hate it.
In the broader space people love it. I know plenty of people 50+ who use it as their search engine now, people who use it for relationship advice, my wife works with someone who claims to be dating an AI boyfriend (don't ask me how that works). And that's to say nothing of everyone who uses it to write their mundane emails and spreadsheets.
It only seems to be people heavily involved in tech as part of their day job who have any serious concerns about it.
A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.
Are you one of them? The other side of the issue is "raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities" according to the article. I guess the crux is figuring out who would suffer the most, data center expanders/builders, or the local community? If the latter, then this move seems right from my point of view, but I'm also not building/managing data centers.
I think it's reasonable to pump the brakes for a year (which is what they've done) and then see where things are in a year, even when there is just a risk to the local community. Worst case scenario, those businesses and data centers end up one year behind schedule, compared to the downsides, that seems acceptable to me.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
I have a family member that wants to ban all data centers and I felt like Daniel Plainview in the milkshake scene showing them the AWS region selector interface, explaining that regional data center bans in deep leftist areas won't move the needle.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
"totalitarian" for a democratically elected representative government to ban something? How? If other counties or states want them fine, godspeed, take them. We'll be just fine without them.
- Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.
The regional AI policies can be fully democratic, but banning AI data center construction globally would require coordination that only a totalitarian undemocratic one world government could achieve.
Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.
Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.
Where did anyone say a global ban or even national? I personally do not see it as "an incredible economic opportunity," I see it as a massive gamble that won't bear fruit, but that's beside the point. If localities want to bet on them fine, they can have them like I originally said.
A lot of us would be happy with them being more heavily taxed on consumption and that money going directly to making everyone’s utility bills much cheaper. Being forced to create more capacity would also be great.
Wont move the needle? Go ahead and build shit in your community, I'm happy its being kept out of mine. Stop trying to pretend like NY is trying to legislate the nation by maintaining its own front and backyard.
We should build more data centers. Provided we extract as a political concession UBI so that the LLMs that run in these places, which are trained on a public corpus and will doubtlessly increasingly eliminate the bargaining power of millions of Americans, do not primarily benefit only their already fabulously wealthy owners.
We can build a better society in which this UBI is scaled as LLMs take over more of the economy. Otherwise, we are clearly headed for more shocks to the American political system as increasingly dubious figures create more phantoms (poor day laborers are "taking your job", China is to blame for American companies taking advantage of "free trade") which will keep tipping towards outright fascism ("enemy of the people", ICE executing people in the streets) to blame for our fundamental societal issues that apparently no one is interested in solving - the societal affects of transformative economic shifts - which no, cannot be stopped or postponed or placed in moratorium indefinitely.
We might as well all push for this now with highly consequential elections approaching over the next 2 - 3 years. Because the insanity will only get worse. We've seen this pattern before. The famous fascists of the 20th century weren't born that way and their path was not inevitable. Many of them actually humorously careened from something more like "far left" communism to fascism as they tried to figure out what would stick in trying to appeal to a world wrought with the consequences of war and economic disruption - delayed affects of the industrial revolution. Don't just try to halt the LLM revolution - you cannot, and you will fail - but be clear about what your demands are.
Moratoriums should have some sense of acceptance criteria or demands. They should not be ways for politicians to simply delay the inevitable because they have no good answers. I think these concerns about power consumption are excuses to deal with the real problems. It's not like energy consumption is thought of as intrinsically bad by the people pushing for these bans. I think LLMs could ultimately be better for society than my neighbor's spotless F-150. It's clear the antagonism to these data centers comes from the inequities around how the gains will be distributed. Ultimately state moratoriums are also ineffective because they will just move to another state, so people in New York will lose in the short term (or benefit - depending on what exactly you object to), but either way we all suffer in the longterm. Make UBI a demand of people running for national office that want your vote.
A moratorium seems excessive when the requirements to make a majority of people happy are pretty clear.
The easy ones are:
1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid.
2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.
A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.
Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!
A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.
Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...
If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.
My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
I love AI assisted learning and code generation - absolutely despise AI “art” though - image, music, written word, video. If AI was just being used to get shit done efficiently, what a dream that would be, instead we are generating infinite mountains of useless bytes to suck people’s brains out in TikTok feeds and annihilate access to original thoughts in a Google search.
It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.
Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.
Obviously you're welcome to whatever beliefs comfort you, but most data centers that are anywhere near anyone are not related to AI, largely because AI applications are not very sensitive to latency and don't need to be near users. The specific one in Hayward I mentioned is advertised for corporate IT, as is another one in Pittsburg (California).
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
But we are talking about new data centers that are usually being built for the exact purpose of housing AI facilities? I'm not sure why you are being so obtuse about this point. Stating what already exists in data centers in general misses the point, either in ignorance or you are just being disingenuous. Given that you don't seem ignorant, it leaves the rest of us with the belief it'd only be the latter.
No way. DCs and DC expansion existed before AI but they were inconsequential. What's new is the massive ones being built by the lowest bidder solely for AI. For a working template look at the xAI one that gave an entire town asthma, but luckily most of them overrun cost and get abandoned.
You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.
The Army should just shell that place, but Elon's crimes are not mainstream data center projects. I don't think we should allow someone to just set up a gas pipeline and open the valve, but I also apply this logic proportionally to major polluters like cars and airplanes and non-IT grid loads that rely on fossil fuel generators.
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
> web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller
> huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies
The latter point is doing a lot of heavy lifting because the first point is whitewashing history. Back in the 90's, you had exactly one cable TV provider, one phone provider, maybe one or two cell phone providers if you could afford one, and your internet options were limited to either your cable TV provider or your landline phone provider for DSL, or AOL if you were really unfortunate.
You probably had one trash / sanitation provider, one choice of place to send your kids to school (unless you went the religious school route or could afford a private school, assuming one was nearby). You had one option for getting your mail delivered. One choice for policing, for fire protection and other emergency services, etc. Having only a few options has been a pretty big part of a lot of daily life.
The internet felt more wild and free, because there weren't too many places to go, and most people didn't go there. The internet didn't shrink, but people who started going online went all went to the same places, so all the growth went... where people actually wanted to go.
Well, the 90s were a time of liberalization/deregulation so definitely a moving target, but the monopolies/layer of mediation were held back by variety cultural, regulatory and legislative checks. Glass-Steagall was repealed in '99, fairness doctorine was repealed in '87, but the mindset and expectations remained in place, the idea of Citizens United would have been considered absurd, agencies had stronger regulations, etc etc. Today you have a handful of people who control these companies (non voting shares) paying money directly to the president in return for preferential access. Laws and the public interest are not a part of any consideration.
Here's a practical example: your gmail account today is probably more important to you than your phone number was in the 90s and you can run afoul of some random ML subsystem and lose access. There is no recourse or accountability. Randomly loosing your phone number and not having recourse was not a thing back then.
But yes, I was on the internet in the 90s, the little playground we fled to has grown into a terrible panopticon run by unaccountable people for their own personal interest. NIMBY DC opposition is a terrible proxy to tackle this, but it may be the only tool available.
This is caused by capital accumulation. An oft repeated comment is "these guys being billionaires doesn't make you poor". But it does - it gives them large-scale unilateral control of society's resources to the detriment of regular people. This is an example.
These feels like bribe seeking behavior. Pol sees an industry that likely will have a lot of potential market within the pol's jurisdiction, pol publicly puts a speedbump or roadblock in front of the industry causing the industry to start lobbying pol/pol's friends.
A good solution for this is just the AI companies to cut access to this types of areas. After all AI is just bubble that will pop any second. It obviously have no economic values as the tokenmaxxing fiasco showed. I know it is true because NYTimes wrote on the matter.
How are (can) datacenters be taxed?
Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity.
You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.
The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.
They keep negotiating payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to dodge fair tax rates and grab special treatment, so we do see a loss in value there over decade(s) in many cases.
Sure, there’s plenty of places where you could plausibly build a data center, so the leverage that localities have to insist on high tax rates is limited.
You tax the revenue that the entity that owns the datacentre generates, like any other business.
Am I missing something?
The entities that own the data centers (the mag7) famously do not pay much in taxes due to their extensive use of tax havens and loopholes
"tax havens and loopholes"
Feels like we should fix those instead of wonton lashing out at any and all economic output.
If the factory in Tennessee is its own legal entity and the sales office is in another (it’s a group) then yes transfer pricing is used where the goal is to use the market price of an arm length distance (what would you pay for the factory/data center if it was someone unrelated to you) and if same company (guess more uncommon) you use formulas to allocate where value is created and where taxes should be paid.
If you can't tax the outputs you tax the input.
So force then to pay more for electricity or water either through direct taxes or by forcing them to subsidize other users.
Data centers should probably be mostly regional or local co-ops with community-based dividends like Alaska.
Why do data centers need to be taxed separately?
Why does the local community need their take from that economic activity? What are they even providing? Are they providing land, electricity, and hardware for free to the data center?
If human activity is taxed, AI activity will be taxed. It's just inevitable. It will be taxed at multiple levels until we figure out the right level to do so. Some of it will be detrimental to AI development but that's normal - in Canada we had a hidden manufacturing sales tax until the 80s which made exports more expensive.
A technology that puts X% of people out of work is going to be taxed.
For two reasons: 1. They create externalities 2. They generate an economic flux that can be taxed
The factory comparison is a moot point. This isn't about taxation.
Do you think the people hysterically screaming about a data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory?
We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use less energy than traditional factories and less water than golf courses). These are all solved problems.
The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning in secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately. The doomsday religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria given their end times prophecy did not come true. No amount of tax money will provide the same level of meaning as LARPing as an activist fighting in defense of an abstract fragile god (a femininely delicate "mother earth").
> The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning in secular modernity will not come via taxation
Well we better figure out where it ought to come from then. Maybe AI can help us explore the latent space.
I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
> I see this as a continuation of that
You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.
There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent.
Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.
There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.
Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.
And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.
Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.
[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/micron-delay-construct...
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
> There are no objective concerns to be met
Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable.
> the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states
What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states would make more sense here. Red states are not impoverished of politics, they just have different politics.
"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing"
Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.
Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?
I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.
Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry.
If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.
It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.
> If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible to address it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being externally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
If "this" was a single new Ford plant, I would imagine that the local population around it would be having a similar conversation.
If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.
The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
"Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article"
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
Sure, that's a fair point. You're right that I don't have those numbers, and I would be willing to be that at the moment, no one does.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
Un-blocking is still easier than un-building.
Good. AI is an evil technology. These data centers shouldn't be built anywhere ever.
Exactly.
Wall Street is gonna finance these projects and make their cut wherever the projects ultimately are. NY state is simply ensuring that no concrete batch plant in Oneonta accidentally gets rich along the way too,
To some extent you wonder if this "tapping the brakes" might be saving some companies from themselves. It's likely we're in the overinvestment phase of this technological cycle and that's usually followed by the bust phase where a lot of companies with a lot of debt go under. See The Panic of 1873 and the overbuilding of railroads (and huge debt accumulation) that led to that.
Exactly. Towns are also increasingly nervous that when the bottom drops out of the AI bubble they’ll be left with abandoned half-built data centers blighting their communities.
It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible. The bond market for financing buildouts is looking shaky and even Amazon struggled there in its last go at loaning money to fuel the buildout. That doesn’t bode well for others.
Even a completed one has limited use to other industries
> We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
Let's be honest. There is a way to safely build data centers. Sensible laws could be made for them to build enough solar so they can power themselves or they are responsible for the cost of increasing capacity. Things like environmental impact and pollution need to be taken into account. However, since this is America, that won't happen. So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
> So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
Unfortunately environmental damage is not limited to the places that pollute the most - we all suffer even if we aren’t the ones doing it.
> People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive,
Red states still have a significant population that don't vote Republican and they're more often than not the ones who bear the brunt of negatives like data center construction.
Yeah, I hate this narrative that rural areas are 99% republican maga people. Often they win the vote by at best a few percentage points.
Like how the dnc is surprised when their overzealous and poorly thought out gun control measures are turned down by democratic voters. Of course they are, near 50% of rural areas are democrats and many own and use guns. They aren't going to just bandwagon along with poorly conceived legislation that restricts their actively used rights.
Yeah! It really sucks. Still, what should NY do of that?
>The state currently has more than 130 data centers, according to Data Center Map, compared with more than 600 in Virginia and about 500 in Texas.
Texas is physically larger and 'business frienedly' so suspect they will be getting a lot more.
Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
The Governance of that oh-so-dependable Texan power grid are going to engage in some macabre arithmetic this Winter...
That happened in 2021 and we haven't had similar issues since. I haven't experienced a power grid failure since then.
The previous failure was in 2011, and didn't happen again until a decade later. The root cause hasn't been resolved since 2021: the demand and weather conditions simply haven't recurred since.
Yes, it's just tiring to hear the same meme putdowns about how this Winter we're all going to suffer when we probably have less brownouts etc than a lot of other places.
I remember 2011 but I didn't actually have any issues with a power failure it was just extremely icy. These are freak weather events, generally the grid holds up fine. I'm not saying we don't have issues but it is kind o foverblown.
According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.
They have a very strong solar buildout going on, and they don't care how many environmentalists they piss off to get them built, ironically.
Clearly this is a problem, Texas being the one state notoriously known for not having any natural resources or energy production infrastructure.
They only have 12 years of proven natural gas reserves left so you should take up whatever issues you have w/ lack of natural resources w/ mother nature. Most of the new capacity they are planning to build are natural gas & coal plants. Renewables are not reliable enough for data centers.
And they will, because Texas allows building.
Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?
If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything. Even on this supposedly 'intellectually-minded' forum the extreme irony flies over the heads of most.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
My town isn't perfect in those terms but it's probably about as good as possible, so yes I would have. Of all the places I've lived, tho, there's certainly lots of thing I would have opposed, given the chance, like all those highways.
Then you should move to Texas. Seems like that would solve whatever issue you have w/ lack of new buildings or whatever you're concerned about.
> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.
> One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.
This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.
Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.
So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists.
Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I have some bad news for you.
> 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.
Yeah and that's how we got a messed up environment.
Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact studies existed caused severe health issues for the surrounding communities, including cancer and death. That's why we have environmental impact studies now.
Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending.
We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?
Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?
Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?
I'm struggling to understand here.
> We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything
These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".
> But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.
> what about Datacenters is uniquely bad
- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts
- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)
- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)
- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife
> Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.
I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.
many of the data centers are being built with natural gas generators on site, and they are using excess gas from the oil drilling.
Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves report" even details a scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply in 2026.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2025/02/12/CapacityDemandan...
Now add data centre demand in a climate where passive-cooling isn't viable and inter-state redundancy is non-existent.
Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.
Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.
>> El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico.
El Paso is not part of the Texas grid (ERCOT):
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/us-grid-regions
Neither are the panhandle nor the northeastern portion.
GGP didn't say ERCOT, they said "Texas". Which further demonstrates how ignorant it is to say there are "no major connections".
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-TEX-ERCO/live/fi...
Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.
https://www.spp.org/documents/71831/ercot-spp%20coordination...
No one wants the grid to collapse after all (except you I guess, for whatever reason).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
> The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas
Including in-flight projects, that totals several GW. Texas demand today is pretty low for noon - clouds and rain in much of the state, and we're at 70 GW.
Building interconnects costs money. What's the ROI on building more?
Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.
Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?
Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.
Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.
>in a climate where passive-cooling isn't viable
Chips can also be water cooled, and Texas borders an endless supply of water in the Gulf of America.
Are you being serious or sarcastic?
Completely serious. Sea water cooling for data centers is already in use here in Helsinki. And water temperature in the Gulf of America doesn't seem to go above 30 C even in the summer.
https://news.ftcpublications.com/core/coastal-cities-test-se...
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/regsatprod/gom/sst_map.php
Sea water would have to be piped to places like Dallas, whereas much of Finland's people/data centers are closer to the shoreline. A solution that works in certain places does not generally work everywhere.
There's no need to build them in Dallas. Just keep them near the shoreline. The only reason you have so many data centers in North Jersey is so high frequency traders can make their calls 0.02ms before their competitors on the NYSE. For an average user, the 1ms ping between Dallas and Corpus Christi is not a problem.
We have a home in Houston. Over by the big gates down Sunset.
I have no particular objection to building datacenters there.
All that said, I think you're being real hand-wave-y here. The climate in Houston is materially different than it is in Dallas. So there's likely a reason these companies have been locating their enormously expensive assets where they have been locating them.
Houston floods. Often.
Houston gets hit by Hurricanes.
Houston is hot and humid with relatively high ground water tables.
Don't even get me started on the power and the durability issues arising from the use of sea water.
There's a lot to work out there. You put what you can afford to lose in Houston, but you don't bet the farm on coastal Texas. You just can't do that if you want resilient infrastructure.
They are many already planned/under construction/built/expanding, there are also wildfires and hurricanes to consider.
Its easy to offer hypothetical solutions for a far when details are amis. It's another thing to deal with local politics
The gas generators are what make the hum that people complain about; I'd expect the outside of a data center to be quiet without those.
Better for the extra natural gas to power data centers than to "accidentally" leak into the atmosphere .
> Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
It’s all fun and games until the cost of beef and oil skyrockets.
Taylor Sheridan's movie studio is on land that was once a ranch
Really? How ironic
> Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
More likely he is going to make something like Landman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landman_(TV_series)#Renewable_...
story about a salt of the earth datacenter operator who manages the datacenter and people while spreading misinformation about the impact of datacenters on people.
Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
The Catskills have those environmental protection laws because they are the water source for NYC. It would be very stupid to relax those to build data centers.
NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change.
Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.
Replacing natural lands with solar farms is one of the stupidest things I've seen. They're doing that on some state parks near me.
Why are people disagreeing? I find it wild that people actually condone putting a solar farm on a state park. That land is supposed to be mostly natural and for public use. If the park wants to power itself using solar, then put it on the roofs and cover the parking areas with panels. Don't contract out a forest/field to be developed as a solar farm.
Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems like city people want to exploit the natural lands to produce their electricity. True NIMBY. It's hard to claim to care about the environment when being willing to destroy it when alternatives exist.
What would be unnatural lands that you'd find acceptable for use?
Existing infrastructure, such as roofs and parking lots.
Yeah why do I have to pay to get it in my roof when a solar company will buy land to put up solar cells. Just put it on my roof instead. I won't complain.
>Replacing natural lands with solar farms is one of the stupidest things I've seen
"Says here[1] on this study published by university lab funded by a consortium of the same interests that develop the solar that this is fine"
-smarmy HN linkposters
[1] <link to study that doesn't even support my thesis but you can't tell because it's behind a paywall>
> I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS
They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.
That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.
The AI ones are a hundred times larger. Formerly you needed a building to house racks where each customer had a few servers, now they want a megacomplex all dedicated to one purpose. Few of these are even getting completed, most are abandoned for cost reasons.
Oregon has a 1-year moratorium on new data centers qualifying for the state's Enterprise Zone (EZ) property tax incentive programs (as of June 5, 2026. We shouldn't be giving tax incentives to these Data Centers. But it looks like this NY moratorium goes way beyond that to actually stopping construction.
Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.
With datacenters there is a huge amount of ragebait in the news and social media. People are anxious about jobs and reporters and influencers are cashing in on that anxiety by running headlines that imply doom. Datacenters are hugely problematic. But, everywhere I go I see media and commenters exaggerating, implying, assuming, or just making up outrageous claims. But, it's the hot topic right now and outrage drives the clicks that pays the bills. So, ragebait it is.
We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.
The anti-climate change movement has been around well before social media so it is pretty much just ingrained at this point. Anti-datacenter is feeling the influence of social media. So while people are not as motivated by anti-climate change as they are numb to it, the datacenter movement can still gets all of the feels.
This just means that DC builds will move to other states. It isn't exactly like you need low latency/colocation for AI workloads.
Probably but now planning of these datacenters will now include power redundancy and a shit ton of backup power. Some commenters here think "just move dc to texas." Sounds like a good idea until you realize grid is nearly entirely separate from federal grid. State manages it and completely ignores any attempts to weatherize it.
2021 was an absolute disaster. There was a moment where the grid could have completely collapsed. But by some luck, the state avoided that.
Can they do that next time? Shall wait and see.
Isn't that the point? Keeping data centers out of neighborhoods that don't want them?
Not really. The people who oppose them don’t want data centers anywhere, at all.
Not exactly. Much of the anti-datacenter population got that way from hearing about the irresponsible ones and don't want it happening in their area. If they never heard about it because it was in the middle of nowhere, then they wouldn't be involved. It's NIMBY - data center or houses, don't build it near me.
A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing, I don’t think it’s fair to say they are both coming from the same NIMBY sentiment. Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no
"Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no"
This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.
>A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing,
On the flip side a datacenter never showed up to a town meeting to screech about how my way of life ought to be illegal, how the businesses I patronize ought to be punitively regulated, how I ought to pay more taxes so that the city can do things I don't want done, etc, etc.
And I say this as someone who already lives near a bunch of industrial sites.
Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, this is pretty clumsy regulation that will just cause Tiebout sorting away from NY. If there are negative externalities, tax 'em, use the proceeds for some feel-good social programming, and let the data center builders internalize the costs...
Why would people move to jurisdictions that are building AI datacenters? It seems like people would move away from them.
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
New York heavily restricts construction and infrastructure projects of all kinds. The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.
NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of.
[1]. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/new-york-city-population...
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.
Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.
AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.
I consider myself pretty YIMBY, but the data center build outs are definitely starting to catch my eye.
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
> On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here
As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular.
For example, https://newyorkyimby.com/ is pretty much exclusively about housing.
Data centers in space sounds really stupid until you consider how hard it is to get a data center built on Earth.
Even then, it still sounds stupid.
I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Ny also for as long as I've been here, does not try to have first mover advantage. The state really does usually show up second or third to the party. So to speak.
Too often people forget to mention all the first mover disadvantages. It’s often perfectly fine to wait for things to evolve and join when they are better understood and stabilized. Let the others spend money, political capital, and figure out what works, then eventually join the party, without all the baggage the first movers have accumulated.
Same with AI stuff. No you don’t need to be at the forefront of whatever is happening. No you won’t be left behind if that actually completely revolutionize the world, you can let the others try and fail to integrate LLMs in their systems. When it is eventually proven to boost ROI in a reliable way and AI vendors have actually figured out a reliable business model, it’s actually pretty simple to learn the technology and integrate in your existing infra
why are we talking about bernie sanders in the context of new york state? he's a US senator from vermont. this is state-level politics, not federal, in the state of new york, not vermont. and he's not mentioned once in this article?
> I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these
Perhaps the majority of people in Vermont want him to be vocal about it and he is simply doing his actual job.
AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
> AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
That goes against my personal experience. It's only people in this small tech bubble that hate it.
In the broader space people love it. I know plenty of people 50+ who use it as their search engine now, people who use it for relationship advice, my wife works with someone who claims to be dating an AI boyfriend (don't ask me how that works). And that's to say nothing of everyone who uses it to write their mundane emails and spreadsheets.
It only seems to be people heavily involved in tech as part of their day job who have any serious concerns about it.
> That goes against my personal experience.
Anecdotal experience doesn't matter. Mine contradicts yours, but my anecdotal experience also isn't strong evidence.
There are countless polls showing that the American public's sentiment towards AI is both negative and falling.
Instead of blaming the energy supply restrictions those states have imposed, the politicians are now blaming datacenters.
A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.
Are you one of them? The other side of the issue is "raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities" according to the article. I guess the crux is figuring out who would suffer the most, data center expanders/builders, or the local community? If the latter, then this move seems right from my point of view, but I'm also not building/managing data centers.
I think it's reasonable to pump the brakes for a year (which is what they've done) and then see where things are in a year, even when there is just a risk to the local community. Worst case scenario, those businesses and data centers end up one year behind schedule, compared to the downsides, that seems acceptable to me.
It only applies to DCs > 50MW.
Should read the article before spouting off FUD
> One-year construction ban will apply to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, official says
This is targeting "hyperscalers" or AI dcs. Non-AI datacenters consume well below this threshold.
2026 is an election year for the Governor. One year moratorium conveniently allows the incumbent to have cake and eat it too.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
I have a family member that wants to ban all data centers and I felt like Daniel Plainview in the milkshake scene showing them the AWS region selector interface, explaining that regional data center bans in deep leftist areas won't move the needle.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
"totalitarian" for a democratically elected representative government to ban something? How? If other counties or states want them fine, godspeed, take them. We'll be just fine without them.
- Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.
The regional AI policies can be fully democratic, but banning AI data center construction globally would require coordination that only a totalitarian undemocratic one world government could achieve.
Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.
Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.
Where did anyone say a global ban or even national? I personally do not see it as "an incredible economic opportunity," I see it as a massive gamble that won't bear fruit, but that's beside the point. If localities want to bet on them fine, they can have them like I originally said.
> "totalitarian" for a democratically elected representative government to ban something?
Steven Miller has figured it out
A lot of us would be happy with them being more heavily taxed on consumption and that money going directly to making everyone’s utility bills much cheaper. Being forced to create more capacity would also be great.
> areas won't move the needle
Wont move the needle? Go ahead and build shit in your community, I'm happy its being kept out of mine. Stop trying to pretend like NY is trying to legislate the nation by maintaining its own front and backyard.
We should build more data centers. Provided we extract as a political concession UBI so that the LLMs that run in these places, which are trained on a public corpus and will doubtlessly increasingly eliminate the bargaining power of millions of Americans, do not primarily benefit only their already fabulously wealthy owners.
We can build a better society in which this UBI is scaled as LLMs take over more of the economy. Otherwise, we are clearly headed for more shocks to the American political system as increasingly dubious figures create more phantoms (poor day laborers are "taking your job", China is to blame for American companies taking advantage of "free trade") which will keep tipping towards outright fascism ("enemy of the people", ICE executing people in the streets) to blame for our fundamental societal issues that apparently no one is interested in solving - the societal affects of transformative economic shifts - which no, cannot be stopped or postponed or placed in moratorium indefinitely.
We might as well all push for this now with highly consequential elections approaching over the next 2 - 3 years. Because the insanity will only get worse. We've seen this pattern before. The famous fascists of the 20th century weren't born that way and their path was not inevitable. Many of them actually humorously careened from something more like "far left" communism to fascism as they tried to figure out what would stick in trying to appeal to a world wrought with the consequences of war and economic disruption - delayed affects of the industrial revolution. Don't just try to halt the LLM revolution - you cannot, and you will fail - but be clear about what your demands are.
Moratoriums should have some sense of acceptance criteria or demands. They should not be ways for politicians to simply delay the inevitable because they have no good answers. I think these concerns about power consumption are excuses to deal with the real problems. It's not like energy consumption is thought of as intrinsically bad by the people pushing for these bans. I think LLMs could ultimately be better for society than my neighbor's spotless F-150. It's clear the antagonism to these data centers comes from the inequities around how the gains will be distributed. Ultimately state moratoriums are also ineffective because they will just move to another state, so people in New York will lose in the short term (or benefit - depending on what exactly you object to), but either way we all suffer in the longterm. Make UBI a demand of people running for national office that want your vote.
A moratorium seems excessive when the requirements to make a majority of people happy are pretty clear.
The easy ones are:
1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid. 2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.
A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.
Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!
A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.
Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...
If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.
My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
In US politics at least that’s plenty to shut things down, which is exactly what’s happening.
I love AI assisted learning and code generation - absolutely despise AI “art” though - image, music, written word, video. If AI was just being used to get shit done efficiently, what a dream that would be, instead we are generating infinite mountains of useless bytes to suck people’s brains out in TikTok feeds and annihilate access to original thoughts in a Google search.
Your closer to a 2/3 and 1/3 split then a coin flip with 60%.
You handwaved that 40% to a positive. This could easily mean very few people have a positive view of AI.
The only point I was making is that 40% is a huge number.
60% is a 50% bigger number than 40%, so I don't understand your point at all.
Generally, in American winner-take-all politics, 60% is considered a massive landslide.
> 40 is a massive number
Where does that leave 60, then?
It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.
Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.
Obviously you're welcome to whatever beliefs comfort you, but most data centers that are anywhere near anyone are not related to AI, largely because AI applications are not very sensitive to latency and don't need to be near users. The specific one in Hayward I mentioned is advertised for corporate IT, as is another one in Pittsburg (California).
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
But we are talking about new data centers that are usually being built for the exact purpose of housing AI facilities? I'm not sure why you are being so obtuse about this point. Stating what already exists in data centers in general misses the point, either in ignorance or you are just being disingenuous. Given that you don't seem ignorant, it leaves the rest of us with the belief it'd only be the latter.
You’re clearly ignoring the context of “new and rapidly built” and are instead using the metric of all data centers in existence.
You’re technically correct, but missing the point and imo arguing more or less with yourself only.
No way. DCs and DC expansion existed before AI but they were inconsequential. What's new is the massive ones being built by the lowest bidder solely for AI. For a working template look at the xAI one that gave an entire town asthma, but luckily most of them overrun cost and get abandoned.
You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.
The Army should just shell that place, but Elon's crimes are not mainstream data center projects. I don't think we should allow someone to just set up a gas pipeline and open the valve, but I also apply this logic proportionally to major polluters like cars and airplanes and non-IT grid loads that rely on fossil fuel generators.
What would the advantage be to New Yorkers if they were built here?
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
</sarcasm>
Finally, we are free from the tyranny of Glonzo.
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
> web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller
> huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies
The latter point is doing a lot of heavy lifting because the first point is whitewashing history. Back in the 90's, you had exactly one cable TV provider, one phone provider, maybe one or two cell phone providers if you could afford one, and your internet options were limited to either your cable TV provider or your landline phone provider for DSL, or AOL if you were really unfortunate.
You probably had one trash / sanitation provider, one choice of place to send your kids to school (unless you went the religious school route or could afford a private school, assuming one was nearby). You had one option for getting your mail delivered. One choice for policing, for fire protection and other emergency services, etc. Having only a few options has been a pretty big part of a lot of daily life.
The internet felt more wild and free, because there weren't too many places to go, and most people didn't go there. The internet didn't shrink, but people who started going online went all went to the same places, so all the growth went... where people actually wanted to go.
Well, the 90s were a time of liberalization/deregulation so definitely a moving target, but the monopolies/layer of mediation were held back by variety cultural, regulatory and legislative checks. Glass-Steagall was repealed in '99, fairness doctorine was repealed in '87, but the mindset and expectations remained in place, the idea of Citizens United would have been considered absurd, agencies had stronger regulations, etc etc. Today you have a handful of people who control these companies (non voting shares) paying money directly to the president in return for preferential access. Laws and the public interest are not a part of any consideration.
Here's a practical example: your gmail account today is probably more important to you than your phone number was in the 90s and you can run afoul of some random ML subsystem and lose access. There is no recourse or accountability. Randomly loosing your phone number and not having recourse was not a thing back then.
But yes, I was on the internet in the 90s, the little playground we fled to has grown into a terrible panopticon run by unaccountable people for their own personal interest. NIMBY DC opposition is a terrible proxy to tackle this, but it may be the only tool available.
This is caused by capital accumulation. An oft repeated comment is "these guys being billionaires doesn't make you poor". But it does - it gives them large-scale unilateral control of society's resources to the detriment of regular people. This is an example.
These feels like bribe seeking behavior. Pol sees an industry that likely will have a lot of potential market within the pol's jurisdiction, pol publicly puts a speedbump or roadblock in front of the industry causing the industry to start lobbying pol/pol's friends.
A good solution for this is just the AI companies to cut access to this types of areas. After all AI is just bubble that will pop any second. It obviously have no economic values as the tokenmaxxing fiasco showed. I know it is true because NYTimes wrote on the matter.