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

Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

wpr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 383 posts

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

#161

Post by Throaway1982 »

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?

Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.

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

#164

Post by Throaway1982 »

bespokedevelopr wrote: post #148

I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in. I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a…

its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had

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

#165

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.

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

#166

Post by chneu »

its_ethan wrote: post #123
ecshafer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.

When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.

Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.

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

#167

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

hobs wrote: post #117
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor... Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.

Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.

But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.

Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.

Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).

Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.

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

#168

Post by cyanydeez »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #156

I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions. The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation incre…

They primary concern is these centers will force water and energy expansions and those will be equally split.

Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had?

The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.

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

#169

Post by fc417fc802 »

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…

An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.

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

#170

Post by triceratops »

Throaway1982 wrote: post #161
jandrewrogers wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.

Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.
Post reply on HN