81–90 of 190 posts
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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. F…
Or if nobody wants to buy them
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…
I would do a little due diligence here if I were you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc. It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?
Aluminum smelters use a lot of DC power, but smelters aren't popping up like VC fertilized mushrooms.
These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance:
* Water use: Almost always a red herring or non-issue, unless the DC is being built in an area with water shortages. DC's use a lot of water, but their use is negligible compared to many other industries.
* Neighborhood appearance: They're not particularly pretty to have in your back yard, but much less ugly than, say, a factory. They're not inherently polluting.
* Power draw: This is a legitimate concern as DC's use an enormous amount of electricity. In the short run, it could make sense for deep-pocketed investors to subsidize residential or non-DC power consumption to keep everyone's electric bills from skyrocketing. Longer term, power companies will need to build much more generating infrastructure. I'd love to see a carbon tax to encourage the construction of renewable (or nuclear) power. Sadly, the current US administration seems intent on vice-maxing and ruining as much as they can for future generations.
* AI-driven job displacement: I think this is the real worry people have. The water use thing is an excuse people are looking for to oppose AI.
My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal.
And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.
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How many temporary and permanent jobs does an empty lot provide? Many temporary and a few permanent sounds much better.
New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.
The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.
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How many temporary and permanent jobs does an empty lot provide? Many temporary and a few permanent sounds much better.
New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.
> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.
https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...
National trend:
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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
The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.
But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about
Populist nonsense like this is all that New York passes. Data Centers have minimal impact, provides some jobs, and New York needs to upgrade their power system and build more power plants anyways.
> Data Centers have minimal impact 50k residents of Lake Tahoe need to find a new source of electricity now that their power provider is planning to feed a nearby data center[0]. 0: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-...
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Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?
Cars were not a new technology either when they went nuts on highway infrastructure which ruined the city centers. Perhaps if they had slowed down and studied the impacts before bulldozing neighborhood for highways some damage might have been prevented.
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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. F…
Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.