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

reuters.com

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

#181

Post by overfeed »

coryrc wrote: post #96
piltdownman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pow…

> Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to ...

Anywhere else in the transmission network that has excess generation capacity. If the biggest state benefits from interconnection, why wouldn't the second biggest benefit too?

Daily demand is cyclic, even with no additional capacity added, being connected to grids in other timezones that have different demand peak-times is a net win.

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

#182

Post by ecshafer »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #179
ianm218 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People move towards places with growing economic opportunities. New York heavily restricts construction and infrastructure projects of all kinds. The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities. NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scar…

> NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of. The Mayor is literally implementing stuff to build more affordable housing. I agree that ultimately a lot less regulation is needed to make it easier to simply build, but your take on it belongs in a New York Post editorial. It's not serious…

The mayor of NYC froze rent... rent controls are the opposite of building more affordable housing, since it disincentivizes building and renting units.

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

#183

Post by overfeed »

axus wrote: post #99
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.

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 .

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

I'm guessing this is an easy win when you don't live or work near one, and not the one breathing the resulting particulates and nitrogen compounds.

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

#185

Post by inigyou »

ianm218 wrote: post #169
overfeed wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see this as a continuation of that You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.

There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent. Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects. There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for the…

And then afterwards the electricity gets shut off to everyone who isn't a data center? That's what Georgia is threatening right now.

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

#186

Post by inigyou »

twoodfin wrote: post #148
kotaKat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, there’s plenty of places where you could plausibly build a data center, so the leverage that localities have to insist on high tax rates is limited.

Then it can't be that bad to move it to another state, right?

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

#187

Post by inigyou »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #118
whartung wrote: post #97

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…

Why do data centers need to be taxed separately? Why does the local community need their take from that economic activity? What are they even providing? Are they providing land, electricity, and hardware for free to the data center?

The xAI one is emitting so much NOx pollution that it gave entire towns asthma for the rest of their lives and nobody is compensating them for it. People in Georgia are being threatened with no electricity next year because it's all going to data centers.

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

#188

Post by xboxnolifes »

aynyc wrote: post #28
cromka wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.

That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.

Go too far south and they start being Philadelphia data centers.

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

#189

Post by xboxnolifes »

miyoji wrote: post #105
MC995 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble. That goes against my personal experience. It's only people in this small tech bubble that hate it. In the broader space people love it. I know plenty of people 50+ who use it as their search engine now, people who use it for relationship advice, my wife works with someone who claims to be dating an AI boyfriend (don't ask me how that works). And that's to sa…

> That goes against my personal experience. Anecdotal experience doesn't matter. Mine contradicts yours, but my anecdotal experience also isn't strong evidence. There are countless polls showing that the American public's sentiment towards AI is both negative and falling.

If the polls properly separated concerns out, I'd wager the real sentiment is something like:

BAD:

  - AI companies
  - AI datacenters (in my neighborhood)
  - AI art
  - AI marketing being everywhere
GOOD:

  - AI as a search engine
  - AI that does my work for me

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

#190

Post by TheGRS »

dml2135 wrote: post #143
TheGRS wrote: post #94

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 pro…

> On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular. For example, https://newyorkyimby.com/ is pretty much exclusively about housing.

It definitely also applies to infrastructure like building out clean energy or highways. My connection there was to say, yes build a data center so that we also need to build more energy production. I feel like a lot of people view the current problem from the lens that energy is a finite resource, when its also something that can be expanded.
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