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

51–60 of 190 posts

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

#51

Post by arjie »

sgerenser wrote: post #19
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 ge…

I do have GPUs running there and I'd be running them denser if I'd already paid for the power. To be honest, there's no room on 3rd Street to put turbines next to the DC there so if they wanted to put in AI they'd have to upgrade the power delivery. I don't mind that so much. Besides, most DC operators would rather pay for power than do on-site generation. That's just an artifact of what we disincentivize. Water always finds the lowest point and so on.

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

#52

Post by kube-system »

declan_roberts wrote: post #46
nazgulsenpai wrote: post #4

I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.

Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess

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

#53

Post by throwaway198846 »

babypuncher wrote: post #50
declan_roberts wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.

These are not new or unpredictable impacts.

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

#54

Post by boringg »

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #4

I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.

Whats new about this? We've had data centers for 20 years now? Research which impacts?

Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.

I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.

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

#56

Post by kube-system »

throwaway198846 wrote: post #53
babypuncher wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.

These are not new or unpredictable impacts.

The scale is new, and impacts are predictable, thus the moratorium.

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

#57

Post by WarmWash »

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.

Those things are cash cows for local municipalities. I don't think that aspect is communicated at all, or at least the media leaves that part out.

A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.

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

#58

Post by cucumber3732842 »

kube-system wrote: post #52
declan_roberts wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess

What mess? It's a big empty metal box with a heck of an HVAC system and a parking lot sized for industrial use. Just about any less specialized use could be pivoted to at any point during or after construction.

These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.

Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.

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

#59

Post by Swizec »

kibwen wrote: post #27
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…

Datacenters are extremely loud, you definitely don't want one in your approximate backyard. Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.

> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.

Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.

These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.

Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.

We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.

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

#60

Post by fintechjock »

babypuncher wrote: post #50
declan_roberts wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.

How are they harming consumers?

I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.

Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t

Post reply on HN