21–25 of 25 posts
No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know. They are a gigantic externality, plunked down in the midst of people who do not benefit from them, but have to bear the costs of the noise, pollution, and increased energy and water costs.
No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know. They are a gigantic externality, plunked down in the midst of people who do not benefit from them, but have to bear the costs of the noise, pollution, and increased energy and water costs.
I’m in Ashburn Virginia and I literally live less than 1 mile from the highest concentration of data centers in the world. People are buying townhomes homes built across the street from data centers. What you might not understand is Loudoun heavily regulates data centers in this area. All infrastructure improvements needed to power and cool the data centers are paid by service providers. The water used to cool our da…
I'm sitting about 10 feet away from my own rack, and yet I'm happy that my municipality just passed a datacenter moratorium. Why? Because once these things are built, there appears to be nothing the community can do to force them to fix problems (on pain of shutdown) or otherwise regulate them once their externalities become apparent. So the only rational thing to do is to say no from the outset.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in Ashburn Virginia and I literally live less than 1 mile from the highest concentration of data centers in the world. People are buying townhomes homes built across the street from data centers. What you might not understand is Loudoun heavily regulates data centers in this area. All infrastructure improvements needed to power and cool the data centers are paid by service providers. The water used to cool our da…
I'd say the underlying problem here is the general lack of accountability. We have a breakdown in the social contract of the idea that there is any kind of justice to be had by the common person. This manifests in concerns both about the physical data center themselves - high pitched whine from cooling fans that everybody seems powerless to stop, and natural gas power plants snuck in under the auspices of being "temp…
If your local government doesn’t already employ competent people that can properly regulate and oversee the infrastructure impact of a data center, they will be overwhelmed by experts who know how to steamroll them. Passing a moratorium is the right thing for that community to do because it’s clear their local government isn’t up to the task of keeping a giant corporation (that employs armies of experts) accountable.
It is safer to say no from the outset.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say the underlying problem here is the general lack of accountability. We have a breakdown in the social contract of the idea that there is any kind of justice to be had by the common person. This manifests in concerns both about the physical data center themselves - high pitched whine from cooling fans that everybody seems powerless to stop, and natural gas power plants snuck in under the auspices of being "temp…
You’re right. The problem is most local governments do not know how to enforce accountability when working with organizations that want to build data centers. If your local government doesn’t already employ competent people that can properly regulate and oversee the infrastructure impact of a data center, they will be overwhelmed by experts who know how to steamroll them. Passing a moratorium is the right thing for t…
And that's before getting into federal nonsense where if a community does successfully reign in a datacenter, there is a chance the operator could appeal to the federal regime to override the local laws (as we're hearing about with the on-site natural gas power plants and whatnot). It's best to just not allow any kind of foothold in the first place.
The post is not wrong. It’s just incomplete and the headline is wrong. A lot of what Cuban is saying is true. But in the U.S., a lack of regulations means that the local effects of data centers, in terms of overloading the grid, water supplies and creating noise (and sometimes air) pollution are significant.
This is the issue. There are big differences in how individual companies build and operate data centers. The average hyperscale data center from a major player is vastly different than some of the crypto mining, small time data center builds I’ve seen. An AI-focused center from AWS, Google, or Meta tends to be large, but also relatively quiet and they make a lot of effort to ensure they’re not overloading the local i…