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Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid. Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.
In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
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I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
> Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes. I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact? Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framewo…
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Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?
Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
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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…
I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1]. Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering. Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions. They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water…
I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are…
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…
Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down. When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping th…
I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.
If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.
Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.
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Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?
If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.
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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 do…
This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.