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

reuters.com

131–140 of 242 posts

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

#131

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 instan…

Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity.

You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.

The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.

Clearly this is a problem, Texas being the one state notoriously known for not having any natural resources or energy production infrastructure.

They only have 12 years of proven natural gas reserves left so you should take up whatever issues you have w/ lack of natural resources w/ mother nature. Most of the new capacity they are planning to build are natural gas & coal plants. Renewables are not reliable enough for data centers.

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

#133
post #119
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

If "this" was a single new Ford plant, I would imagine that the local population around it would be having a similar conversation. If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it. The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at leas…

"Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article"

This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".

What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.

I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.

P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.

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

#134
post #56
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.

What would be unnatural lands that you'd find acceptable for use?

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

#135
post #78

I have a family member that wants to ban all data centers and I felt like Daniel Plainview in the milkshake scene showing them the AWS region selector interface, explaining that regional data center bans in deep leftist areas won't move the needle. Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening. These people shoul…

"totalitarian" for a democratically elected representative government to ban something? How? If other counties or states want them fine, godspeed, take them. We'll be just fine without them. - Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.

The regional AI policies can be fully democratic, but banning AI data center construction globally would require coordination that only a totalitarian undemocratic one world government could achieve.

Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.

Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.

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

#136

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 instan…

Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity. You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center. The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the stat…

They keep negotiating payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to dodge fair tax rates and grab special treatment, so we do see a loss in value there over decade(s) in many cases.

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

#138

Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition…

The anti-climate change movement has been around well before social media so it is pretty much just ingrained at this point. Anti-datacenter is feeling the influence of social media. So while people are not as motivated by anti-climate change as they are numb to it, the datacenter movement can still gets all of the feels.

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

#139
A moratorium seems excessive when the requirements to make a majority of people happy are pretty clear.

The easy ones are:

1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid. 2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.

A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.

Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!

A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.

Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...

If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.

My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.

And they will, because Texas allows building. Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built? If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about? One of the most bizarre contr…

> If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?

If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.

> One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.

This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.

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