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

New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 242 posts

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#91

Post by xyst »

kyledrake wrote: post #54

A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.

Should read the article before spouting off FUD

> One-year construction ban will apply to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, official says

This is targeting "hyperscalers" or AI dcs. Non-AI datacenters consume well below this threshold.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#92

Post by giantg2 »

dgellow wrote: post #75
giantg2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Much of the anti-datacenter population got that way from hearing about the irresponsible ones and don't want it happening in their area. If they never heard about it because it was in the middle of nowhere, then they wouldn't be involved. It's NIMBY - data center or houses, don't build it near me.

A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing, I don’t think it’s fair to say they are both coming from the same NIMBY sentiment. Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no

"Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no"

This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#93

Post by weberer »

prpl wrote: post #82
weberer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in a climate where passive-cooling isn't viable Chips can also be water cooled, and Texas borders an endless supply of water in the Gulf of America.

Are you being serious or sarcastic?

Completely serious. Sea water cooling for data centers is already in use here in Helsinki. And water temperature in the Gulf of America doesn't seem to go above 30 C even in the summer.

https://news.ftcpublications.com/core/coastal-cities-test-se...

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/regsatprod/gom/sst_map.php

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#94

Post by TheGRS »

I consider myself pretty YIMBY, but the data center build outs are definitely starting to catch my eye.

On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.

On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.

I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#95

Post by sanex »

giantg2 wrote: post #56
aynyc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change. Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.

Replacing natural lands with solar farms is one of the stupidest things I've seen. They're doing that on some state parks near me.

Yeah why do I have to pay to get it in my roof when a solar company will buy land to put up solar cells. Just put it on my roof instead. I won't complain.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#96

Post by coryrc »

piltdownman wrote: post #52
ecshafer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many of the data centers are being built with natural gas generators on site, and they are using excess gas from the oil drilling.

Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas. Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves r…

Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.

Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).

I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#97

Post by whartung »

How are (can) datacenters be taxed?

Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.

The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.

But how does that work with a datacenter?

If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?

Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?

As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.

Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#98

Post by dlubarov »

pj_mukh wrote: post #73
afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no objective concerns to be met Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable. > the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states wo…

"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing" Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state. Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new For…

Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry.

If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.

It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#99

Post by axus »

ecshafer wrote: post #40
piltdownman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Governance of that oh-so-dependable Texan power grid are going to engage in some macabre arithmetic this Winter...

many of the data centers are being built with natural gas generators on site, and they are using excess gas from the oil drilling.

The gas generators are what make the hum that people complain about; I'd expect the outside of a data center to be quiet without those.

Better for the extra natural gas to power data centers than to "accidentally" leak into the atmosphere .

Re: New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

#100

Post by ASinclair »

bklosky wrote: post #68

Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, this is pretty clumsy regulation that will just cause Tiebout sorting away from NY. If there are negative externalities, tax 'em, use the proceeds for some feel-good social programming, and let the data center builders internalize the costs...

Why would people move to jurisdictions that are building AI datacenters? It seems like people would move away from them.
Post reply on HN