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

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

#141

Post by mgrunwald_ »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #126
mgrunwald_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The timing can make a big difference though, as they might be happy to burn through money to get better adoption, especially if that pumps up their stock price. Also, if the executive making the decision is looking to jump ship, then they might not care about the long term impact.

I don't think they are happy about burning through money, especially if they can just build their data center somewhere else and avoid the 200% tax. The moment of reckoning is happening in real time, all paid plans for AI models are heavily subsidised and heavy users are absolutely ruining their finances. Do you think they would want to build their data center specifically in a 200% data center tax area to make their financial situation even worse? I don't think so.

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

#142

Post by Henchman21 »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #117
bigmadshoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This is a pretty broad generalization with nothing offered to back it up. In addition, it seems pretty insulting generally.

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

#143

Post by suddenlybananas »

sieve wrote: post #136
amluto wrote: 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…

> Datacenters are weird In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits. I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.

>train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases

All of these create a ton of jobs in the local area and many of them provide massive advantages to the local area (except railway lines if you're not near a station I guess).

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

#144

Post by oblio »

smw wrote: post #133
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think we need a citation about the libertarian / capitalism thing? I know a lot of leftist engineers. Look how blue the bay area votes?

Does the Bay Area have forced integration/bussing for schools? Massive amounts of affordable housing? East Asian city levels of public transit?

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

#145

Post by amluto »

vitally3643 wrote: post #109
oersted wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot). But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There'…

I’m sure there is real data and real math available.

For heating: imagine a 1km^2 campus. That’s 1e6 m^2, and peak daylight is around 1kW/m^2. So peak daylight on the campus is about 1GW. (Wow, just covering the whole campus with solar panels would be pretty awesome!) If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.

As for noise, there is no substantial noise emission inherent to the operation, so I expect it largely comes down to how hard the facility tries to mitigate accidental noise and how well local regulators enforce sound measurement and control. Consider a high-end Noctua or similar fan, compared to a super cheap fan of comparable RPM, flow, and static pressure — a 30dB difference in emitted sound is entirely plausible. The datacenter has some switching noise from handling its 1GW of power, but it also has lots and lots of fans and pumps.

An LLM informs me that 1kW of acoustic energy radiated into free air (no surfaces) is 79dB SPL, Z curve (unweighted), at a range of 1km. So if 1 part per million of the datacenter’s power consumption ends up as noise, it’s loud. There are all manner of corrections needed. For example, your ears’ sensitivity is much lower at non-peak-sensitivity frequencies. But the data center isn’t in free air, and the effect of the ground, the atmosphere under appropriate circumstances, and the height of the datacenter could easily dramatically increase the intensity at longish distances.

A lot of this boils down to large datacenters using immense amounts of power and that power being something you would prefer not to have redirected at you in any form.

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

#146

Post by notarobot123 »

sieve wrote: post #136
amluto wrote: 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…

> Datacenters are weird In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits. I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.

The point is that most utilities like transport infrastructure and sewage treatment benefit local residents and the broader society directly. Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.

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

#147

Post by eqvinox »

znpy wrote: post #134
morpheuskafka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, but would also bring massive truck loads to the local roads and corresponding pollution. The low staffing of datacenters means that one they are built there is little transportation impact.

> A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, It would add low value-added jobs though (unskilled labor). Datacenters add high value-added jobs (skilled labor). Only looking at the headcount is shortsighted imho.

> Datacenters add high value-added jobs (skilled labor).

The highest skill job an AI datacenter adds locally is electrician or climate technician. And not many of those.

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

#148

Post by pfdietz »

toasty228 wrote: post #18
dukeyukey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers. 2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.

> 1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers. As if it was a charity lmao, this is a top priority, before defense even, food security will become more and more of a problem, that and water

It shows free trade was a hypocritical charade even before Trump. Europe spent years inventing reasons why US grain and soybeans had to be excluded. GMO witch hunting, for example.

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

#149

Post by swiftcoder »

smw wrote: post #124
vitally3643 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot). But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There'…

I think the idea that they raise outdoor temps over a wide area is a myth spread on facebook. The physics doesn't work out.

Just adding a square kilometre of parking lots raises the surrounding temperatures measurably, so I don't see how building a datacenter that size is going to have less impact

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

#150

Post by Aurornis »

vitally3643 wrote: post #109
oersted wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot). But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There'…

> and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area

There was a study posted here on this exact topic a few weeks back. The most they could measure was a little over 1 degree C near the datacenter.

> But the point is they suck up land and resources

Land use for a datacenter is kind of negligible. Even the largest data centers are barely a rounding error compared to all of the other commercial and industrial operations around me.

Like it's not even close.

> They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.

For what it's worth, all of the data center projects I've looked up near me are being built in remote or industrial areas. It hasn't stopped the protestors, who are arranging for bus transport to get to the sites because they're so far away.

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