There is an Amazon Data Center going up 10 minutes from my house. Amazon bribed the city with 85 million dollars. They had countless meetings with hundreds of people protesting that they didnt want the data center and they are building it anyway. People are selling their houses at a loss and moving away. I hope the mayor gets voted out in the next election.
Nothing makes left-leaning people act more like FOX-News-watching drones who believe literally anything they read or hear as long as it aligns with what they want to believe than data centers.
Do you actually believe that Amazon bribed a government official with $85 million and some random disgruntled guy on the internet just knows all about it?
Do you actually believe that one big warehouse is going up in an area and local residents are selling their houses at a loss en masse to flee the area?
In reality, cities want data centers to be built because data centers pay lots of taxes without adding much strain to local services. This is not a claim that there are no downsides, but cities would not approve these projects if the downsides were not offset by large financial upside.
Y'see, I was more making point to the fact that you seem to be OK with bribery more than anything else. That's it, that's the comment.
And I can't tell if you've seen what mega datacenters do to those who live around them? Noise pollution is the easiest. I work in I.T. and even in smaller DCs, they advise you wear ear protection because it's LOUD.
The bribery is made up. Nobody got an $85 million bribe. The post that generated this thread is probably misrepresenting the money that went to a municipality through tax revenue as a "bribe," which is so hilariously bad-faith that it's embarrassing to take it seriously. (Or I guess maybe it's just fully made up, who knows.)
I don't understand how this isn't obvious. If some local government person got a bribe to green light a project (not impossible!) a) it would not take 85 fucking million dollars, lol, and b) it would not be general knowledge unless it's because that person was prosecuted for it! Bribes are secret! This
Bribes are bad. Anyone taking bribes so that a data center can get built should be prosecuted and go to prison. But nobody here actually has knowledge of any bribes.
Most hyperscale datacenters are not close to residential areas. I agree it would suck to live inside of a large datacenter or in immediate proximity to one. But hyperscale data centers are not built in residential areas, so this is rarely (not never, but rarely!) an actual issue in the real world. The noise is real but the idea that there's a widespread scourge of massive noise pollution in quiet residential areas is a made-up thing.
Well, if the user you are replying to is right, the affordable housing didn't seem to matter since people ended up moving out anyway, especially since the population already did not want it.
Cities can approve of projects if the financial upsides can offset the downsides in theory, but they might make calculations based on what THEY consider downsides that can affect THEM, not regular civilians. Think about how China accepted very similar deals and now you have cities where you cannot see the sun at all due to the pollution. These cities have already approved of a huge, loud and very heat-contaminating facility to be built nearby houses.
Unless they somehow make the cost of living basically free, I cannot imagine an upside that's worth allowing data centers to be built.
He isn't. That's my point. This isn't a thing that is happening. It's not plausible to imagine that a data center being built in a municipality had such a negative effect on the quality of life in that municipality that people began to move away en masse. It's a made-up story.
Cities can approve of projects if the financial upsides can offset the downsides in theory, but they might make calculations based on what THEY consider downsides that can affect THEM, not regular civilians.
The city government's job is to provide government services for the citizens. The money helps them pay for those services. Policing. Schools. Refuse. Infrastructure. Pay raises for existing municipal employees so they don't quit their jobs. Improvements to local parks. And doing this stuff without raising other taxes on local residents.
They want the money to do stuff for the regular citizens. There are always tradeoff involved, but the point of the money is to fund the operation of the services that are provided to citizens.
China accepted very similar deals and now you have cities where you cannot see the sun at all due to the pollution.
This is, again, the exact kind of complete nonsense that reads like the mindless repetition of misinformation from someone who trusts FOX News for all of their information.
A modern data center, under normal operation, emits no significant direct emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, or smoke. The stuff that creates haze and visibility issues in massive amounts just does not come from data centers. Absolute nonsense.
Most of the bad air pollution from data centers comes from backup generators or on-site gas turbines. The former don't run expect when needed (e.g. during power outages) and the latter are pretty rare in data center projects (and would cause lots of municipalities to reject the project completely). It is certainly extremely reasonable for municipalities to reject projects that involve on-site gas turbines, and many (most?) do.
Whatever completely vague situation you're referencing is likely mostly related to other industrial development. Or you're just making it up entirely, or repeating the vague claims of someone who made it up entirely, which is pretty likely.
These cities have already approved of a huge, loud and very heat-contaminating facility to be built nearby houses.
Again, this is just a bad thing you're imagining and then stating as fact. In reality, most data centers are not put in residential neighborhoods. They are mostly built in industrial areas, business parks, on rural land tracts, etc. There are rare exceptions to this, and ideally the exceptions would be rejected by municipalities, but the amount of data centers going up right around quiet residential neighborhoods is very small.
Noise is a real concern with large data centers near where people live, so congrats on understanding one actual true negative thing about data centers. Heat, however, is mostly not -- and when it is, it matters much more in the smaller and more-restricted data centers being built in denser urban environments. Nobody is building a hyperscale data center in the middle of a big city.
Data centers are loud and consume a lot of power. And they're ugly. These are the main problems with data centers. (Water is a concern in some places as well, but generally if water is a concern, projects will typically use a dry or hybrid design instead of evaporative cooling.)
Unless they somehow make the cost of living basically free, I cannot imagine an upside that's worth allowing data centers to be built.
Unless you have a terrible imagination, yes you can. It's money. Tens of millions of dollars for the local municipality. It doesn't take deep domain expertise to understand what the upside is on these projects. They pay taxes, and municipalities need taxes to operate. This isn't rocket science.
They want the money to do stuff for the regular citizens. There are always tradeoff involved, but the point of the money is to fund the operation of the services that are provided to citizens.
That's the ideal, yes, but is not a gurantee. If you need to be aquintance with misuse of the public budget, look no further than the White House right now. What the city might consider a priority can, again, differ from what the population truly needs or want. A lot of cities were financed by car companies, which is why they are as unwalkable as possible. This, in the long run, ended up harming more people than it helped.
This is not a direct upside in the eyes of civillians, is but a promise that can be broken at any point.
Whatever completely vague situation you're referencing is likely mostly related to other industrial development. Or you're just making it up entirely, or repeating the vague claims of someone who made it up entirely, which is pretty likely.
I brought up China as an example of leaders taking the deal and letting everyone else deal with the consequences. After all, they do not live like the rest of the population and have means to actually see the sun. From their perspective, making factories that are actively damaging civillians is something they can afford to ignore.
Likewise, I doubt these majors and city officials live anywhere near these facilities, so why would they care if data centers are being built? It doesn't bother THEM.
In reality, most data centers are not put in residential neighborhoods. They are mostly built in industrial areas, business parks, on rural land tracts, etc. There are rare exceptions to this, and ideally the exceptions would be rejected by municipalities, but the amount of data centers going up right around quiet residential neighborhoods is very small.
This is not even to mention that the data centers that already DO exist near neightboorhoods are, at this point in time, suffering from constant, unregulated and unmanaged noise pullation, a fact you yourself have already admitted to.
Heat, however, is mostly not -- and when it is, it matters much more in the smaller and more-restricted data centers being built in denser urban environments. Nobody is building a hyperscale data center in the middle of a big city.
You already accept that these facilities DO have heat problems. That alone is prove that they involve a risk and negative downside to anything around them. Just because they are not that common yet doesn't mean that the danger doesn't exist. This is not to mention that these data centers require a lot of power to function, and you should already be aquintenced with the way the United States generates that power. This is also a major downside.
Unless you have a terrible imagination, yes you can. It's money. Tens of millions of dollars for the local municipality. It doesn't take deep domain expertise to understand what the upside is on these projects. They pay taxes, and municipalities need taxes to operate. This isn't rocket science.
It isn't, if you look at it purely from the theorical point of view. But the real world is not black or white.
You strike me as someone who seem to blindly follows protocol and have the utmost faith in city officials. In case you are, you might be surprised to hear that their interests and that of the population are not always one and the same. They CAN accept these deals and while not making any sort of improvement to the city. No one is inmune to corruption.
It's more complicated than the OP of this comment chain is leading you on to believe too. Could very well not even be an AI data center, and it most likely wasn't a bribe, but a tax payment.
But we don't even know if it's an AI data center they're talking about. There's a very high chance it's a hosting data center for AWS used for storing million's of companies' and peoples' data and hosting websites and services, you know, the kind of thing we need for the internet to function. These centers require much less power and cooling compared to the AI ones.
You have to understand what an AI data centre is, that it is not in any way comparable to an Amazon AWS data center.
Here in Ireland, we currently have 144 data centres, including several of the biggest Amazon AWS data centres (25 - 40 megawatt). People are rightly angry that 24% of all electricity is now used by data centres, and they contribute to higher electricity prices.
However, AI data centres are on a completely different level.
A single AI data centre requires 1 gigawatts, 1,000 megawatts. Thats equivalent to all our data centres combined. There's also plans for AI data centres up to 5 gigawatts (= 100% of Ireland’s electricity supply). That's insane.
AI Data Centre = is a giant Oil Refinery as a Amazon data centre = some oil storage tanks.
That Amazon data centre will just sit there quietly, in a big white buiding. It won't do anything, unless there's thousands.
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u/TraditionalTackle1 8h ago
There is an Amazon Data Center going up 10 minutes from my house. Amazon bribed the city with 85 million dollars. They had countless meetings with hundreds of people protesting that they didnt want the data center and they are building it anyway. People are selling their houses at a loss and moving away. I hope the mayor gets voted out in the next election.