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Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

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Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#71

Post by stymaar »

perks_12 wrote: post #19

Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards. Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction

There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#72

Post by vessenes »

_vertigo wrote: post #57
perks_12 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.

Interesting — so in your opinion every country must build out datacenters or be left behind?

I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.

Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.

It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.

In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#73

Post by zdragnar »

vessenes wrote: post #66
amluto wrote: post #60

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability…

Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.

You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#74

Post by palmotea »

vessenes wrote: post #66
amluto wrote: post #60

To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability…

Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.

Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#75

Post by stymaar »

dgellow wrote: post #63
perks_12 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.

Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?

> Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite?

The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#76

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

mgrunwald_ wrote: post #54
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #15

[flagged]

This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.

Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.

Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#77

Post by oersted »

john_strinlai wrote: post #26
re-thc wrote: post #20

> built in green/agricultural areas So they want them in other areas instead? Like next to residential area? I'm not sure they understand the implications...

> Like next to residential area? or... industrial areas?

Indeed, I don't quite understand the issue. I get that the data centers are big and expensive, but they must be nothing compared to any ordinary heavy-industry site right? In all aspects: space, pollution, energy, water...

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#78

Post by dsign »

I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.

Re: Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas

#80

Post by dukeyukey »

jabl wrote: post #49
dukeyukey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.

But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.

I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.
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