Foxconn on steroids
Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building anything.
Hint: Many people think there are no reasonable plans to use these data centers.
Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
291–300 of 383 posts
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#292I 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.
Power is metered.
If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of the ratepayers then it’s a pricing problem that needs fixing.
The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that capital investment needs to happen at once. You can’t even build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone.
Typically industrial consumers of electricity with predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that’s reflected in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility.
If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation capacity that’s a much larger failure further upstream by regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too for many years. It’s coming for us either way if we want to remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You can only maximize financialization for so long until you need to start actually making stuff again.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#293Earlier 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?
Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry... (hurting the people directly)
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why shouldn't permits be withheld on ethical grounds? Isn't that just giving permission for companies to be unethical and get away with it?
If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally applicable law that provides for such penalties. Withholding permission to do random things based on ad hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for corruption.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone were also betting on quantum computing and the hydrogen energy revolution. My napkin math says that, for a system at around 75°C, you would need about 13,000 square meters of radiators in space to reject 10 MW of heat.
why do you think they are betting on it if it so obvious to you that it won't work?
Kodak made a crypto coin. Where did that end up?
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because some CEOs pour billions into fantasy projects it doesn't mean they're viable. Otherwise we all would be in the metaverse wouldn't we?
Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?
No but you're claiming "if they all are investing X amount then these bets obviously must pan out". If you follow that rationale then it means that all bets that these company's make in the same space must all pan out. So if they don't all pan out then the fact that they're all making bets isn't a sound rationale for it being true.
As others have pointed out, investors notoriously have FOMO, so rationale actors (CEOs of big tech) naturally are incentivized to make bets and claims that they are betting on things that the market believes to be true regardless if they are so as to appease shareholders.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter. Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
It's still contract work. When it's over so is your paycheck.
For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle.
It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three.
Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#298Earlier 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…
it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.
I'm not sure. Cities are supposed to approve or deny applications based on whether they comply with zoning, codes, parking, water availability etc. They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone. A city near me is dealing with a lawsuit for exactly that.
It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here Bezos, sundar, Jensen all are invested. On boring: it’s easy to say in hindsight.
You know why I mentioned hydrogen energy earlier? There was a Financial Times article last month titled "Hydrogen dreams meet reality as oil and gas groups abandon projects", which notes that "Almost 60 major low carbon hydrogen projects—including ones backed by BP and ExxonMobil—have been cancelled" because they weren't economically feasible. Space data centers are in the same place today. It's physics. And none of…
ok so you are smarter than all of them? and if they had put you in charge instead of the phd's, they might have been better off?
Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?
No but you're claiming "if they all are investing X amount then these bets obviously must pan out". If you follow that rationale then it means that all bets that these company's make in the same space must all pan out. So if they don't all pan out then the fact that they're all making bets isn't a sound rationale for it being true. As others have pointed out, investors notoriously have FOMO, so rationale actors (CEOs…
No, i don't claim that all bets must pan out - simply that most bets are made intelligently with serious intent.
that's the way i see this bet as well.
your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect - its the musical chairs theory of markets.