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Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

tomshardware.com

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Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#3
So when it comes down to choice and where to park the money: The votes of humans matter less than the power of AI agents.

Amazon believes that the AI agents need a new home more than humans do and would rather build homes for these agents than for humans.

But of course, the advantages are obvious to them:

1) 24/7 intelligence when you need it.

2) Tokens can be generated cheaply, meaning lots of work for 1 / 100th of the price of a human.

3) Knowledge can stay with the agent and will never leave the company and the agent has no breaks or weekends.

No wonder Amazon saw something like this, wanted it so badly and ignored humans to build more homes for c̶l̶a̶n̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ AI agents. Such a sad state of affairs.

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#4

[flagged]

the police and entire justice system are on the side of capital. The peoples history of the united States by Howard Zinn covers many attempts Luke this. he makes a case for what works and what doesn't. its a large book, but you can find good summaries online.

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#5
Bias Disclaimer: Amazon pays my salary currently, although my job doesn't have anything to do with datacenter construction.

Maybe I missed it, but the article doesn't seem to say what the "circumvention"/"loophole" that Amazon used was? It seems like Amazon went through the correct city permitting/legal processes years ago, and now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic?

Like if Amazon followed the official process here, what's the problem? At some point you have to declare an approval final and allow a company to move forward with construction.

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#7

Bias Disclaimer: Amazon pays my salary currently, although my job doesn't have anything to do with datacenter construction. Maybe I missed it, but the article doesn't seem to say what the "circumvention"/"loophole" that Amazon used was? It seems like Amazon went through the correct city permitting/legal processes years ago, and now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's c…

That was my read as well:

> ...the site had gone through a long approval process, which required public notices and public-comment periods. However, when Gilroy resident Rosa Rodriguez wanted to state her concern about the damage a data center can do to a region suffering from drought, she was told that the comment period had already lapsed in 2024

Is the "circumvention" the headline refers to that public commentary periods are time-boxed? But how could they not be time-boxed?

In fairness to the residents, the negative implications of data centers was probably not well known to them in 2024, but it seems to me that (at least based on the article) all the processes & rules were followed.

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#8

Bias Disclaimer: Amazon pays my salary currently, although my job doesn't have anything to do with datacenter construction. Maybe I missed it, but the article doesn't seem to say what the "circumvention"/"loophole" that Amazon used was? It seems like Amazon went through the correct city permitting/legal processes years ago, and now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's c…

> now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic

I hope one day Amazon or any AI company installs a data center next to your home. Then you will finally understand

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#9

[flagged]

the police and entire justice system are on the side of capital. The peoples history of the united States by Howard Zinn covers many attempts Luke this. he makes a case for what works and what doesn't. its a large book, but you can find good summaries online.

   > the police and entire justice system are on the side of capital
This entire system was created by the capital for the capital.

Re: Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

#10
This headline seems misleading at best. There was, as far as I can tell reading both this piece and the original reporting in the WSJ[0], no community vote for or against data center construction. What appears to have happened is that Amazon simply followed the existing permitting rules for other industrial construction, “Amazon’s project was approved with a single signature—by the town’s community-development director—because it met zoning criteria set 45 years ago for industrial development along a freeway.”[0] The existing zoning laws did not require a public vote to receive a permit, so I don’t understand in what way a public vote was “circumvented”. It’s certainly fair for residents to ask for more input in general on permitting or zoning, and even to place explicit restriction on data centers going forward, but it seems like what people want is an ex post facto law, which is nigh universally bad law.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i...

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