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Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#121

Post by SoftTalker »

m4ck_ wrote: post #50
parpfish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development

Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.

You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#122

Post by gosub100 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #86
emsign wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of: * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick *…

> use too much ground water Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example. The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?

"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#123

Post by its_ethan »

ecshafer wrote: post #74
janice1999 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.

In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Wa…

I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.

Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.

There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#124

Post by miki123211 »

dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#125

Post by zug_zug »

emsign wrote: post #73
dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of: * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick *…

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#126

Post by tmp10423288442 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #108
mistrial9 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too

Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior… Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates. Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely…

As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.

> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.

https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-economy?utm_s...

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#127

Post by cguess »

codethief wrote: post #96
MattSteelblade wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.

I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the other issue that information processing is an inherently dissipative process because entropy etc.)

How would electrical resistance drop in space? If you're thinking "because it's cold" that's actually the biggest issue. The vacuum means you can't dispose of heat easily, so you need giant radiators, which are expensive, heavy, etc.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#128

Post by e40 »

miki123211 wrote: post #124
dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land." The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level…

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#129

Post by blastro »

taco_emoji wrote: post #87
drunner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.

I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

let's hope this holds, i have no reason to expect that in 2026

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#130

Post by state_less »

infecto wrote: post #80
a2128 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowe…

What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.

Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.
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