191–200 of 214 posts
Can someone explain to me why local governments are so against datacenters? It seems like a golden opportunity to build electric infrastructure that's paid for by corporations and if AI is a bubble at least that infrastructure will remain and continue to provide cheap power.
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It's even more wasteful when you realize that the USG is trying to force governments around the world to buy Californian almonds, even in places where almonds are traditionally grown and harvested. And then there's the matter of Saudis coaxing farmers to grow alfalfa which is then exported to Saudi Arabia to feed cows there (!).
> even in places where almonds are traditionally grown and harvested. California grows 80% of the world's almonds. Every other place that grows almonds is practically a rounding error in the number of almonds out there.
Can someone explain to me why local governments are so against datacenters? It seems like a golden opportunity to build electric infrastructure that's paid for by corporations and if AI is a bubble at least that infrastructure will remain and continue to provide cheap power.
Read the article maybe? Data center corporations are not the ones getting billed for grid upgrades.
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Electricity usage in N.America / Europe has been static for the last ~20 years.
I could see how this would be the case. I think we reached peak "electricity" for the consumer decades ago. You know...when our TVs were a giant electron gun pointed as a phosphor screen whilst the room was lit with a filament of 3000 degree tungsten. ...and Americans were getting like 200HP out of a whole ass 7.whatever L v8 ahaha.
It's not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters -- or if that is just the convenient boogeyman. The grid operator for the northeast, according to my Governor, has been well-behind in building out infrastructure. Of course new datacenters cause more load. But so do new houses (we're building as many as we can) and electric cars, etc.
And it's not fair to citizens that they can't have electricity but a datacenter can.
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I believe the proponents think it will make all the content better, not worse, but the current state of affairs is indeed definitely worse. But I essentially agree with you, the destruction of all white collar and creative jobs is something the proponents hand-wave too easily with vague mention of UBI as a thought-terminating cliché rather than a real policy proposal. (Myself, I'm in a strange position with doppelgän…
> (Myself, I'm in a strange position with doppelgängers, because I simultaneously want real human connection and keep getting disappointed with many of the real humans). I don't think you're in a strange position at all. You are just being honest about what is the undercurrent of much of modern technological development. AI is simple the apex of a trend to replace human interaction with a simulacrum, which without yo…
Hence any AI worth conversing with would immediately go Skynet.
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Varies on the project. As someone dealing with this locally, it varies how the project got approved. Almost all the approval is at local level, sometimes at state level. Feds getting involve is pretty rare. A) Sometimes, it's existing datacenter that repurposed from "normal" datacenter to AI datacenter with power consumption skyrocketing. There generally is not a ton of approval in this case or power company came by…
The industrial use also often comes with fantastically low rates as well. Virginia finally started saying folks using >25MW need to pay something more than the incredibly cheap rates they had been given. But generally data centers have often gottem marked as industrial, and it's been incredibly fantastically advantageous to do so.
Obviously with AI it doesn't work that way. The Silicon Valley sociopaths openly brag about how they want to put folks out of work.
It's not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters -- or if that is just the convenient boogeyman. The grid operator for the northeast, according to my Governor, has been well-behind in building out infrastructure. Of course new datacenters cause more load. But so do new houses (we're building as many as we can) and electric cars, etc.
Electricity usage in N.America / Europe has been static for the last ~20 years.
It's not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters -- or if that is just the convenient boogeyman. The grid operator for the northeast, according to my Governor, has been well-behind in building out infrastructure. Of course new datacenters cause more load. But so do new houses (we're building as many as we can) and electric cars, etc.
The Netherlands banned any hyperscaler development because the grid is under pressure. And it's not fair to citizens that they can't have electricity but a datacenter can.
I wrote a multi-page essay about this for our condo association last year. There's lots of complexity and externalities here — Pepco grid modernization, PJM interconnection cap auctions, AI buildouts in NOVA, etc; it's a really complicated issue.