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Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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

#211

Post by sneak »

snarf21 wrote: post #111
simianwords wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about. This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them. I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive? Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are…

Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it. The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth. Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: - demonstration drive of full a…

SpaceX and Starlink are privately held.

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

#212

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #11
newsclues wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secrecy needs a time limit.

Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.

Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.

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

#213

Post by jauer »

engelo_b wrote: post #36
parpfish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development

[dead]

Unlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus with several data halls this means that there’s work for those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you don’t have the steel and concrete work happening that went into the shell, but it’s more than a handful of operations people.

From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly well-automated to the extent that I’d see just a few people on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines or handling shipping and receiving.

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

#214

Post by bluedino »

onionisafruit wrote: post #43

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…

For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres

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

#215

Post by dguest »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #165
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.

I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".

If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.

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

#216

Post by bradford »

mehlmao wrote: post #204
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.

Do you have children? Post some pictures of them so Grok can show us what they look like unclothed and covered in "yogurt". It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but our ruling class has decided against that.

Let's avoid falling into the trap of assuming the worst of people when replying to comments.

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

#217

Post by its_ethan »

chneu wrote: post #166
its_ethan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uti…

Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been.

And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).

Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".

It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".

At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol

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

#218

Post by eigencoder »

josefresco wrote: post #210
eigencoder wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply changed their minds/laws. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-county-... > In 2016, West Jordan City sought…

I admit I may be missing broader context about the state, this was specifically from someone working for Eagle Mountain city planning. But the article you've cited is later in the process than what I'm talking about.

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

#219

Post by almosthere »

These data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"

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

#220

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

webstrand wrote: post #206
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property. It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open c…

Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors, either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to have some insight and input, same as they have input into whether a high density hog farm can open right on the border of the community. Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethi…

Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided they didn't want it.
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