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Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

en.ilsole24ore.com

91–100 of 212 posts

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#91
post #2

[flagged]

If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong. Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).

> the main purpose of the thing

It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries. You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.

The idea of having what equates to trade tariffs for data transfers sounds horrifying. But to be fair, we are kinda suffering similar charges already from all major cloud providers, and we seem to be okay with it... Still horrifying, but not entirely unprecedented I suppose.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#93
post #78

I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.

That's very close to a coin flip.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#94
post #59

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing. The future is what we as humans decide it to be. Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.

The future doesn't always care about what the majority wishes since not everything is up for debate, like for instance the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons, or whether your neighbor or allies suddenly decide to invade you.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.

Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water. Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash…

Please let's not fool ourselves that AI businesses don't care about costs because they have a lot of money. They burn a lot of money, yes, but they are looking for profitability and they won't achieve it with a 200% tax on top of large energy bills and hardware expenses.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#96
post #60

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability…

It's worse than that. Data centers aren't a net zero for the area, they're a net negative. They use up water, arguably pollute said water [1], they jack up the price of everybody's electricity (because everyone else ends up paying for the extra infrastructure), can cause pollution directly (eg xAI runs highly-polluting gas turbines in a city through a legal loophole of them being "mobile" [2]) and aren't the quiet, unseen facilities proponents make them out to be (eg [3]).

On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.

I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

[2]: https://earthjustice.org/case/xai-illegal-gas-power-plant-da...

[3]: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/n...

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#97

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

[flagged]

> So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”?

what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.

As long as we don't see the damaged areas around data centers than all is fine, right? Where have I heard this before?

What damage?

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

Where? What do you tax? Per request? They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services. The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.

>What do you tax?

Physical infrastructure inputs and negative externalities.

For example: electrical grid strain, water table consumption for cooling, and local pollution/carbon footprints.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#100
post #85
post #60

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability…

I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure. EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that…

Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.
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