Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you see coal mining towns as a model to pursue?
Yes they contributed enormous growth without which USA could not have been a dominant power. There are better alternatives now however.
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Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
121–130 of 201 posts
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gigabit internet doesn't power startups. It powers consumer streaming. As long as you can run Zoom, you don't need high internet speeds for startups
You pretty much need low latency 1G+ to work from home these days.
... do you? I have 500mpbs and both my partner and I WFH with no problems.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.
The Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population). This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more. These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities. But I do think…
They could be used for infastructure, but when power and/or water bills go up in responce to local data centers being built it is hard to believe because power and water is infastructure and should have costs going down.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#124Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…
Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these th…
I'm seeing a lot of pushback against data centers in my town, building where there is currently cornfields.
I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year.
Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it).
Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here.
> Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.
We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so.
So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#125What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then you can sell or redevelop later. Now I am expecting a spinoff to Mister Inference and Quick Flops as these sprawling networks of carwashes turn into data centers in 2030
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Water is a renewable resource. It actually is infinite if youre just using it to cool a datacenter, it does not disappear when youre done with it.
It does if that water is being pumped from underground resevoirs that take 100s of years or more to refill then heated up and evaporated away to rain down upon the ocean or run down the Mississippi to the ocean.
I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling system maintence.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water is a renewable resource. It actually is infinite if youre just using it to cool a datacenter, it does not disappear when youre done with it.
It does if that water is being pumped from underground resevoirs that take 100s of years or more to refill then heated up and evaporated away to rain down upon the ocean or run down the Mississippi to the ocean. I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling…
This is a good point and I agree it is important to place systems that use a lot of water close to renewable water resources. That being said, the vast majority of non renewable water usage goes to wasteful desert agriculture and there's comparatively very little backlash toward that. It just seems really dishonest to me to complain about datacenter water usage while ignoring the much larger source of the problem.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#128What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then…
I would imagine car washes to be one of the more difficult kinds of businesses to operate just to hold a lot. You often need a lot of work on drainage and permeability to ensure you're not contaminating local water systems with your car wash.
Storage though, yeah, that makes sense.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#129Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.
Are you sure? AFAIK, Satya did a great job from the point of view of a shareholder - +1,200% from 2014 to today [0] [0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
Not that impressive when MSFT has a monopoly in several verticals that allows them to subsidize their many failures.
Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
#130Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…
Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these th…
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