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

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

#91

Post by thinkingtoilet »

bloppe wrote: post #35
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The biggest possible tax break is zero tax, which is what you get when they move out of state

Again, it would have been a net loss for the city. So walking away with zero is a huge win.

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

#92

Post by WarmWash »

It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.

People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting.

Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.

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

#93

Post by ecshafer »

runtime_terror wrote: post #43
ecshafer wrote: post #34

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.

Minimal impact as defined by whom? I'm sure they impact those that live around them plenty as well as the price on electricity for those on the same grid. They provide mostly temporary jobs (and majority imported to boot), after construction they're run with very little staff. New York needs to upgrade its power grid (source?) so they should force it upon themselves by primitively overloading the grid? A one year mor…

Lets say they build 100 Data Centers in Oswego county. Per Capita income is only $20k and one of the poorest in new york state. There is a lot of space that is not used for anything. 100 Data Centers is going to provide some amount of jobs at each one, remote hands, janitorial, security, etc. Those all pay more than the per capita income. At scale you need some amount of plumbers, facilities, electricians, etc. Not to mention the local labor that gets hired to build them. I know plenty of guys working Steel that leave to go build Data Centers in other places, and go back to upstate new york. Enough Data Centers means more power plants for even more jobs.

In poor rural areas, 50 jobs paying not that much is a big improvement.

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

#95

Post by kube-system »

throwaway198846 wrote: post #62
kube-system wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How much land do data center use and of which type of land?

Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter.

Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.

But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.

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

#96

Post by intrikate »

fintechjock wrote: post #87
wat10000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.

True, for the average HN consumer 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

It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.

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

#97

Post by kemotep »

oceanplexian wrote: post #24
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…

I’d love more datacenters so I can colo my pet projects and startup like I was doing in the early 2000s The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.

I live in rural Ohio and there is like 6? Colo places within an hour’s drive.

When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.

If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.

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

#98

Post by kube-system »

fintechjock wrote: post #60
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.

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 data centers being built due to the AI bubble are predominately increasing costs for public utilities. Many localities are having to make significant investments to keep the lights on and increasing rates for everyone.

If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.

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

#99

Post by nazgulsenpai »

boringg wrote: post #54
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…

I agree. It seems reasonable to me in the sense that - only one year - only affects new agreements and not current buildouts - gives times for politicians to do whatever it is they need to do to satisfy their constituents

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

#100

Post by j_w »

WarmWash wrote: post #92

It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress. People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the peopl…

> It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.

Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.

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