Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

scienceaim.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#11

Post by CodingJeebus »

dylan604 wrote: post #6
defmetrix wrote: post #3

I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.

Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.

"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end.

Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#13

Post by simbosambo »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #11
dylan604 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.

"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end. Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they c…

[dead]

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#15

Post by esseph »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> The obvious answer to everyone's concerns is to build them in unused buildings in cities that already have infrastructure to support them.

This is the problem.

These are mostly old office buildings.

They are not designed to supply that much electricity and water on each floor. These racks and equipment also weigh a lot and the building floors and building itself probably isn't rated for that.

Not only that, but to get the buildings themselves more electricity and water often requires a very expensive process of digging up possibly multiple streets, with associated costs and permitting.

In addition to the water delivery issue, there's power delivery. It may not even be possible to get that building enough power in the next decade or more, because there simply may not be enough power generation capability.

Basically, a lot of the same problems that exist when trying to turn an old office building into high rise apartments, but magnified many times over.

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#16

Post by sincerely »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #5
defmetrix wrote: post #3

I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.

So other people's back yards it is! What a wonderful philosophy. As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the…

Well there are plenty of places that aren’t in anyone’s backyard

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#18

Post by alpha_squared »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #5
defmetrix wrote: post #3

I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.

So other people's back yards it is! What a wonderful philosophy. As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the…

If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?

Re: New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

#19

Post by sgerenser »

arjie wrote: post #8

Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the s…

It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
Post reply on HN