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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

#71

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

a2128 wrote: post #58
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…

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowe…

It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.

But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.

Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.

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

#72

Post by briffle »

janice1999 wrote: post #42
542458 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.

Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.

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.

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

#73

Post by emsign »

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…

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

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

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

#74

Post by ecshafer »

janice1999 wrote: post #42
542458 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.

Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.

In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.

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

#75

Post by buellerbueller »

petcat wrote: post #31
hrimfaxi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership. Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.

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

#76

Post by buellerbueller »

bell-cot wrote: post #44
hrimfaxi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc. But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.

Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.

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

#77

Post by ecshafer »

timmg wrote: post #47

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.

Its pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against all technological or industrial advancement. They are just getting back to their roots.

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

#78

Post by JKCalhoun »

Supermancho wrote: post #66
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…

> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations.…

Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?

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

#79

Post by cobolcomesback »

phkahler wrote: post #24

There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

It’s to run LLMs.

In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.

Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.

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

#80

Post by infecto »

a2128 wrote: post #58
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…

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowe…

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.
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