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Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

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Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#161

Post by napolux »

perks_12 wrote: post #19

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

> I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction

read the article:

> Lombardy alone accounted for 63% of the applications submitted throughout Italy.

> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.

> If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#163

Post by napolux »

jgbuddy wrote: post #114

This is surely a huge blow to all the hyperscalers looking to build datacenters in the agricultural regions of Italy.

Read the article man, Lombardy is basically in the center of Europe, compare Milan with Los Angeles and see how small it is actually

> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.

If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#164

Post by napolux »

dfxm12 wrote: post #89

My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?

Nothing is taxed al 1% in italy, not even basic food (4%)

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#166

Post by bigmadshoe »

shlant wrote: post #97
bigmadshoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers

The hyper-scaler rhetoric absolutely applies here. The proposed Utah data center project will use more energy than the entire state. Do we really need this? The heads of labs have been very clear that the explicit intention is to take away our jobs. We have a choice.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#167

Post by swiftcoder »

perks_12 wrote: post #19

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland)

I think you are discounting the speed at which solar is accelerating in southern Europe. Power is already pretty much free during the daytime on the Spanish and Italian grids, and grid-scale battery installations are starting to come online to spread that curve wider.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#168

Post by gruez »

notarobot123 wrote: post #146
sieve wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Datacenters are weird In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits. I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.

The point is that most utilities like transport infrastructure and sewage treatment benefit local residents and the broader society directly. Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.

>Datacenters are not utilities in the same way and have a much narrower social impact.

chatgpt has 900M weekly active users, so a significant fraction of the world population. Given that the user base probably skews towards rich countries, its proportion among the local population is probably even higher. On the other hand what do you think is the proportion of people who take trains, especially in the US? What about steel plants?

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#169

Post by forlorn_mammoth »

jlebar wrote: post #90
bigmadshoe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

OOC, which past exactly do you want to go back to (and presumably stay at)?

many futures are open to us. It isn't a question of going back to an imagined past, it is choosing and shaping the future we create.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#170

Post by jeffbee »

Aurornis wrote: post #156
jeffbee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That paper was 100% garbage. It hinged entirely on the observation of 1 huge industrial park in Bajio, Mexico, which contains one AWS data center and about 3000 auto parts factories. The before/after breaking point of the effect was during the time that the park went from bare ground to industrial park. It has nothing to do with the data center.

Interesting. So the minimal heat rise observed was from the total transformation of the entire area and they blamed it all on the datacenter?

Yes. And just on the arithmetic it should be crystal clear that no data center is anywhere near energetic enough to heat the countryside for miles around. The effect comes from the man-made surfaces facing the sun instead of natural ground cover. Only the sun has the energy to do this.

I used the paper's data to investigate some of their claims. The top figure shows the temperature in the area surrounding Google's Oklahoma data center, in the middle of the figure. I think you can clearly see that the effect is totally dominated by the nearby coal power station and its huge, black pile of slag.

https://observablehq.com/@jwb/data-center-temperature-effect...

The scene is roughly here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2154925,-95.3281217,13968m/d...

Edit: fixed notebook access. Sorry.

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