Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid. We're currently building a nuclear reactor in my county as well. This is economic growth and a good thing. My town is dying. Main street is depressing. There's a general lack of optimism in the people here.
This is exactly the argument people are worried about. "If prices go up, it's a good thing." For whom? Residents will have to pay this for a decade before a nuclear reactor comes online.
That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day for the sake of shareholder value.
> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
> Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction
You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
> This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me.
At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it."
We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams.
I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce.
> You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
This is a good point. I see that I misunderstood your original argument - I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful, rather than what you actually said, which was the perception of and response to the increase. My apologies. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
There can be multiple effects for a given action. The main objection I have to this argument is the idea that the only beneficiaries of any corporate decision are the shareholders.
>> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
> No they aren't
You literally said they are building data centers to cater to demand later on in your own comment:
> If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built
There you go. Your own point debunked by your own words.
> They aren't benevolently trying to help you out
I didn't say anything about the owners building stuff out of charity or benevolence. Are you responding to the wrong comment? Yours is more-or-less irrelevant to mine in addition to being self-contradictory.
Please own up to the fact that you self-contradicted yourself in your own comment by first claiming that "No they aren't" and then "If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built".
> It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
...and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant. Do you understand what relevance means? It means that there's meaning, implication. You haven't given a single follow-on implication from that hypothesis that actually matters to the discussion.
> Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
No, this is just factually false.
Fact: for datacenters, without market demand, without a buyer, shareholder value cannot possibly be generated.
So, first there is a market, and then companies act on it to generate shareholder value.
You're living in a world detached from reality where "shareholder value" exists as its own separate entity that can generate market demand.
You need to take a high-school level economics course so that you don't make objectively incorrect statements like this.
> If you think people's motivations are irrelevant
I never said that peoples' motivations are irrelevant in general. Just that they're irrelevant in this specific case. You're putting words in my mouth, which clearly indicates malice.
> then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing
We do. I live in reality, where most people understand basic facts of economics, causality is meaningful, and you still haven't actually provided a reason why you think that the motivations matter, so as far as the rest of us in the real world know, they don't. You've had three comments to point that out, and you haven't, so the reasonable conclusion is that you don't have a reason, and you're running away to avoid that intellectual dissonance.
Further question, why is it the default position that others should have a say on legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land? Thats frankly absurd. It should be on the people breaching others private property rights to prove real damages.
How can you be sure the workshop on your property doesn't have external impacts? You are being a bad community player by not first getting your workshop inspected and tested and awaiting the permission of the community and government before doing anything there.
Pretending that market-distorting impacts on local utilities, air pollution, noise pollution, etc. etc. are just "legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land" is flabbergastingly dishonest.
Are you sure about noise pollution or are you copying something heardd from uninformed people? Again, thr onus should be on you tonprove damages in court. Its fucking ridiculous that people are clamoring to control others private property.
If I get a vote about new economic activity, and it makes me personally poorer, I'm going to need a very good argument as to why I should permit it. Or, you know, pay me.
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
This is an intellectually dishonest and frankly completely inappropriate attempt to twist someone’s words. HN generally has good standards about acceptable comments and I’m surprised to see this here.
Generally, economic activity is supposed to raise living standards. AI promisses to a.) speed up climate change b.) facilitate surveillance and authoritarian tech bros b.) make people obsolete and unemployable c.) kill us all because reasons.
Datacenter is not bringing more economic activity to the area.
If that new economic activity has lopsided benefits and will never pay off for those negatively impacted by those price increases, then yeah shut it down or regulate it so that the benefits are shared equally by all. Shorter version, if the new economic activity is exploitive of people and their communities, then shut it down hard.
If we brought them up a decade earlier we wouldn’t have had to wait. Instead, we were told “renewables can replace fossil fuels”, despite us lacking the battery capacity to make them viable for the grid. Nuclear is a direct replacement for fossil fuels with better energy generation and actual on-demand capabilities, plus it’s far safer than fossil fuel-backed media will admit. We could have been using both and have completely cut down on emissions while also increasing the lifetime of our nuclear stores.
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
When the grid is already adequate for the existing customers, they should not have a forced upgrade.
More importantly, what says the grid improvements will go beyond upgrading the corridor to the new data centers? Sure, that might benefit customers right along that route, but not customers in general. IOW, even the "overall" improvements are likely to be limited, but the costs will be borne by everyone.
That said, the way grids are going, I consider the right solution to be primarily off-grid solar+battery on every house, maybe with local grids to share/level excess capacity, and maximum local solar/wind+battery for commercial. That would yield a robust power system far more resistant to human disasters relevant to civil defense and natural disasters; when every house can maintain basic communications, refrigeration, and sanitation on a near-indefinite basis (which is not possible with a grid-based collapse/destruction), disasters are far more survivable.
For that little old retired lady who is on a fixed income, of course! It means she'll have to sell that cute little house of hers and let someone turn it into an AirBnB and make some actual money from it.
Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.
1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.
2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.
2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).
Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).
Imagine we focused this anti-DC energy on things that actually have material impacts, like meat consumption and air conditioning.
I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
It's always convenient for you when someone else has to make sacrifices to their job security, housing, financial future, and comfort in order to save the environment, when you get to enjoy all the perks of their sacrifice, without needing to make any equivalent sacrifices yourself.
Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.
I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?
Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.
Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.
My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.
In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.
Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.
I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.
>We all share this world.
Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.
>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?
> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.
It's CO2, it's in my town too.
I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.
> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society
We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.
I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.
>Michigan
So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.
Seems like this can go both ways. You should volunteer to have a bank of loud, polluting turbines from obsolete passenger jets running 24/7 next to your home so Meta can serve GenAI ads with 5% lower latency.
Only if you subscribe to the logic that somehow I support datacenters built in peoples' back yards, which I never claimed, but you made up. If you make stuff up, you can make any argument you want.
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity.
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
> But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Your other points are generally very well-thought-out, but this one is not.
Grid expansions take years. Building new nuclear power plants takes decades. And there's "slack" in the sense that utility prices can raise substantially before there's actually impetus to start planning a grid expansion, and then you still have to wait years for construction to finish.
And the party that takes the hit for those sustained elevated electricity prices is local residents, who in general have far less capital and are disproportionally hurt by it relative to the owns of the data centers.
You can make the argument that the electricity price increases are going to be lower than most people think and wouldn't meaningfully hurt the average local resident, but that's a separate argument. I don't buy that "if it pulls power from the grid that's a good thing" is valid.
If there isn't enough power to meet demand, then build out the grid first, or tax datacenter power consumption so that the inflection pain-point before grid capacity expands is less harmful to the residents.
If building a gas turbine for the data center can be done quickly, then building a gas turbine to expand grid capacity can be done just as quickly. (Barring any poorly thought out, unprincipled regulations that would affect one but not the other.)
Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
Data centers and almost all big companies don’t bring in any taxes. They negotiate zero property taxes for 30 years and have govts pay them money, because they say the half dozen people they employ are going to create a boom in the economy, they will buy houses, eat out, go to bars and this will create money for the local govt and property taxes.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
A "small" datacenter I personally know if in a municipality I am directly involved with generates about $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage) tariff. That ignores any property taxes and the rest.
This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.
I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.
This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.
These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.
Comed in this case. So the PJM interconnect region.
The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.
And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
A nearby town was doing pretty well. Then suddenly on a ton of visible land were built either RV/boat storage places or u-store places. The town feels aweful. Lots of those people able to are moving away because the town just feels bad now. That one move dramatically changed that towns direction/future forever.
It sounds like your town needs a monorail! Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
Using electricity is not breaking anything. "If I sell all my widgets, it's actually a good thing because I'll have to hire more people and manufacture more widgets" is entirely coherent.
Using electricity to the point that the grid cannot accommodate it is indeed breaking something that was working before, and the data center folks are surely not going to be the only ones paying for the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate it.
It'd be like your widget maker harvesting wood for their widgets from public land and exhausting it so the public is left without this resource, then expecting the public to pay to arrange for more wood to be grown to replace the wood they used up.
Apart from the immense greenhouse gas potential, if the wind blows in the wrong direction, you will definitely still get the combustion products. This would be much higher on my priority list than long-term tax revenues.
I was with you for a while here but you say nobody has an argument, then when someone presents one you say that actually that bad thing is a good thing because we'll react to the bad thing in a good way.
Gosh I sure am glad natural gas isn't a major fuel for grid-based generation, and under contention with residential heating. If that were the case, all that extra demand on a limited resource could drive prices up.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
Nuclear plants take over a decade to build. Data centers take a few months or years. New nuclear isn't going to power any data centers for a long, long time.
We are also building a nuclear power plant in the county. I'm excited for the growth that's going to bring. The other reply to this comment is uneducated. Nuclear is incredibly safe.
Maybe these companies can't prevent their own bots from escaping containment and breaching others' systems, but nuclear is surely easier -- and if there's any issue, superintelligence can mitigate the damage.
By the time any of these nuclear plants come online, The current deferred tech debt apocalypse will have played out. The market is efficient, but the efficiency is very weak. This is no exception.
I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
Thank you for being one of the few thoughtful responses. I do feel like people's opinions here are more a position on AI in general than this data center. I come from a stance of, "this is happening so we might as well benefit from it"
Well yes. If a car window gets broken in your town, well that's a simple crime. But if entire parking lots full of cars get their windows broken out that's a crime spree and resources need setup in dealing with it.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
I'm over "this is happening". Like Silicon Valley seems to think it should be implicitly true that their libertarian maximalism should be accepted by the rest of the country. Maybe this is thinking "conservatively" and that's a dirty word, but I don't think it's crazy to ask the capitalists to go back to talking about how their businesses will help normies, and not just steamrolling people with "you can't stop growth". If opposing datacenters makes SV rethink their growth strategies. I'm all for it.
These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
I hear that a lot and I'm happy with my county for making sure we get a good deal out of this. I think a lot of people are informed by the few bad cases and think that all DCs are going to do this.
What about emissions from the generation of this power in salt lake valley? I believe a big argument was the valley with its inversions and geographical layout makes that pollution much worse for people who live in it.
This DC will be probably a 3 hour drive from the Salt Lake valley. We're building a nuclear power plant as well which is going to help with pollution.
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
> Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
The nuclear power plant will only help with pollution if it replaces existing fossil fuel use. If it just meets growing demand, pollution persists, and if growing demand is also filled by some fossil fuels then pollution increases, but just a bit slower because of the nuclear.
And there it is, folks. That is the key issue here - or at least, one of them. This new data center would pollute the environment, not to mention taking up land. The consideration, then, is whether the need for yet another data center justifies the added pollution and land use. That’s a value judgment, and it seems a lot of people say no, we don’t need more data centers, not even for “AI” - at least not enough to justify the added pollution.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
I recall hearing an interview with a democratic politician (can't recall who), he had this thing: data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy). This seems pretty reasonable to me, if the data centres pay for any build-out of the grid required for their operation and bring online green energy, then they are fine. For the community, worst case they go bust and leave behind an improved grid. Off-grid gas generators are not BYONCE.
>data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy)
This is just another way of saying "no data centers can be built". The people who want to build data centers don't care what it's powered by, but they choose gas turbines over wind & solar because renewables can't handle the power demands.
That seems like an awfully defeatist attitude. With all the capital investment flowing into AI, there should be plenty of money to research and improve renewables (including fusion, fission, and battery technology) to meet the moment. After all, we need to move past fossil fuels and are already delayed on this path, so AI is a good catalyst (among many) to make progress.
On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.
I'm not sure how this is a defeatist attitude, I view it more like a realist one. Any rules that would be passed to require mandatory clean energy sourcing for data centers would probably mimic new vehicle emission regulations, which are purposely designed to be so hard to meet that it's a de facto ban.
Have you tried asking Claude? Surely it can solve the problem of "how can we power AI with clean energy?" I mean, if it couldn't do that ... well, it wouldn't really be useful enough to justify building all these datacenters, would it?
If the concern is non-localized resource or debt contention how is it different from any business?
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
Someone with more knowledge than my 2-minutes of googling should correct me, but...
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
> What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
The problem is that anyone who actually cares about such thing has like a dozen better venues to deal with it than data centers, yet they haven't in their lives thought of a single one.
What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
Then the DC should surely help fund it, and its existence should be dependent in its completion? Otherwise it will be like every other large scale development that offers this without being on the hook.
It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
What a surprise people don’t want massive structures used for shady purposes built by sociopaths, which may or may not use massive amount of power and resources, which may or may not be used to displace the entirety of the labor work force, or destroy what’s left of society to develop better algorithms. To also be built literally in unfathomablr quantities, in almost ever decent piece of land, using unfathomable amounts of money.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
The posturing from AI executives has been this will destroy labor. Whether or not that actually happens doesn’t matter - that’s their stance, their dream. They say it basically every chance they get.
Why, then, would average people want to help the people who very plainly state they are against them? It makes no sense.
Everyone here is shocked that average people aren’t willingly to obviously advocate against themselves. Uh, yeah duh. Nobody would.
There’s a lot of well-earned distrust in AI as a whole. The end result is people don’t trust AI companies or their endeavors. This distrust was curated and built by people like Altman and Dario. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you want people to support your projects, you have to at least PRETEND you’re on their side. Telling them straight-up “I intend to ruin your life” isn’t a winning strategy. And, everyone, let’s stop pretending like this is our first day on Earth.
Exactly. What, other than buy yacht and cocaine and hooker, are you going to do with all that money, Sam Altman? Pretend we already gave you all the money. What job can my nephews go to school for so that they will have a career 10 years from now? What research institutes are you going to create to hire people to do the remaining jobs, Sam Altman? I didn't vote for you to be the guy that gets to decide but we live under American Crapitalism so that's the direction we're going.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
Tremonton. My understanding is they're getting their gas from a Wyoming company that just declared bankruptcy so good for them. The DC will help them out a lot. I look forward to the nuclear plant opening to help with the other concerns.
AFAIK, the reason for the position was to tap into a large national gas line that runs between Utah and Idaho. I'm not sure where the wyoming company would come into play unless they are purchasing the company and resuming extraction operations.
I just made a comment about trade offs regarding pollution and land use. This is another good point. Everything is a trade off. If we use a lot of water to get food we need to survive, or even tasty food we enjoy, that’s worth it. But using up a lot of water for a data center, even if it’s less than a farm? That’s still a valid judgment. Lots of people clearly think that’s not worth it as a trade off.
Humans do not need alfalfa to survive. None of these desert farms grow food that humans eat. Most of it gets exported so americans dont even eat the animals that eat it
The farm might not have made food and it might not have made food for human consumption, and even if it did make food it might not be the kind we need to survive. Remember that there are plenty of farms that exist to produce ethanol, HFCS, or inputs for beer/whiskey/etc. makers (which we do not actually need -- drinking is fun but hardly necessary for survival).
It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...
This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
While I agree with where you're coming from in general, the surveillance industry has been happily coasting on downplaying and rejecting such principles for quite some time. Principles like freedom of speech, freedom to own things you purchase, privacy from ever-growing surveillance databases, freedom from unaccountable centralized permissions systems based on those surveillance databases, freedom to use computing technology that serves your own interests, freedom to partake in competitive markets rather than suffering monopolies. That general lack of principles (beyond merely centralized authoritarian control) is now coming home to roost, as people oppose these projects due to some vague sense of a lack of individual agency, but perhaps can't quite articulate why.
If their concerns had been acted on to begin with, most of the existing data centers would never have been built as people would be using computing technology under their own control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps. So I have little sympathy for the surveillance industry now that the jig is nearly up.
The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers
The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
Yes. Oleary bought the farm and there will be no farm there anymore. Using the grid would be good for us too. That's economic growth. There will be short term pain but the increased power use will lead to more jobs. We're already building a nuclear power plant.
Except, of course, that farms use unprocessed water for irrigation and datacenters use treated water for cooling. If the project has its own onsite water treatment, and water rights to the aquifer, then that might be fine, but the majority of these projects expect nearby municipal resources at a scale no farm ever has.
"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
Only valid point I've heard. We'll see what happens. All I'm saying is the DC is happening. We can't stop it. That'd be illegal. At least we're getting a good deal out of it.
I get that they have a right to self determination but when did that start meaning others can’t have opinions about (perceived) short sightedness?
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
Since data centre projects are getting rammed through at breakneck speed despite very widespread opposition, it might look to others like your opinion is actually worth significantly more than theirs, simply because it happens to be shared by a handful of people with god tier money.
A community is not a sovereign nation. I know that eminent domain is considered by many (and historically rightly so) to be a dirty tool, but sometimes it really is in the benefit of the country and its economy to build things even if the people living in or around that area don't like it, especially if their only reason to resisting is "I don't like it".
Thinking that people should decide if an infrastructure megaproject of dubious utility to their community should be built? Basically identical to thinking that people should decide what races live in their community and whether slavery is allowed.
The HN crashout over people suddenly disliking hyperscalers for some reason is something you could only witness here.
Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
If we're talking about the proposed data center near Brigham City, the area is not part of the Colorado River watershed, so the data center would affect other systems but not the Colorado River.
Haha cool. I am firmly against this data-center then. /s
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
As a resident of the Colorado River watershed, our inability to negotiate a sustainable plan for the water is one strong reason I support a moratorium on any new water intensive infrastructure (which does not include all data center designs).
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
The farm grows animal feed that is exported. Why should we support that? It provides 0 value for americans outside the farmer doing the exporting and uses a shitload of the water that we desperately need to fill the lake. Im a UT district 1 voter and at this point Ill vote for anyone that bans farming here in UT. Completely unsustainable
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.
I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?
People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.
>People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The build out will take a couple years. I don't care about the noise. No one will hear it. It's an hour away from anything. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The DC will employee probably 100 high paid people. That money goes back into my town. The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC. It's going to be the biggest tax generator this county has ever seen by a lot. We just had to raise property taxes by 37% to fund our schools. We need the money.
I seriously doubt it needs 100 highly paid people. These will be automated to death. A few guys employed out of state, periodically visiting to swap out dead GPUs and staying in the nearest hotel. Maybe a bored HVAC engineer on site for maintenance.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
I don't know much about this, but isn't Stratos ultimately planned to be 9GW, or 250x the size of your 36MW DC? Even if it doesn't scale proportionally, it's not hard to see it get to 100 people.
According to Oleary it will employ about 5000 permanent workers. According to the county it will employ 1-2k permanent workers. These are going to be rented out data centers to other companies who will staff their people here. There will need to be a large number of people managing the power generation. What resources do you have to say it won't employ 100 people?
These numbers are pretty inconsistent with other major data center rollouts. Furthermore, there are no repercussions (AFAIK) if the project fails to deliver that many permanent jobs. Oleary can say all he wants but unless there is some specific tax or legal measure that says "you must pay at least 2,000 FTE at a rate of $150k/year for at least 20 years" then it's basically impossible to guarantee these numbers. And frankly no data center developer would sign up for that liability knowing full well that humans at data center may well end up being automated (even more than they are today).
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
> The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
According to the county 30 million per year during the build out then 108 million at max capacity. Our budget last year was 76.3 million. This will be more money than we know what to do with.
"This will be more money than we know what to do with." That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. This is what leads to inflated city budgets, wasteful/risky projects and fraud.
few points:
1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly.
2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality.
3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs?
4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC?
5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?
This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.
I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.
The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.
This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.
Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
Yes, I do. Know why I think that? Under threat of another expensive lawsuit, my local datacenter forced our town council to give a 50% tax cut for 12 years. So they are already able to not pay about 1.7 billion in taxes. If they could pay $0, they would.
So your town gave up $140 million PER YEAR in tax revenue to avoid an expensive lawsuit? I call bullshit.
EDIT: I looked it up, not surprisingly, you're really shading the truth here. This is the barn, yes? So it looks like what happened is that the township denied the application for the DC, the developer sued, and the township cut a deal to let the DC go through, with a 50% cut to their tax bill for 12 years. Then the value of the DC went up dramatically, because AI, and the township tried to claim that the tax cut was for 50% of the original value when they approved the tax cut, not 50% of the property value when the tax is due. Their own attorney told them that was bullshit, so they eventually dropped it.
This is like if a store gives you a coupon for 50% off and then you take it in to redeem it a few months later and they've quadrupled their prices, and they try to tell you the coupon actually means 50% off of what their prices were when you got the coupon. Ridiculous.
You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers:
* Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc).
* Massive economic destabilization and disruption
* Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility
* Wars and international conflict
* Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry
* Takeover by governments, use by threat actors
* A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)
>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
I think it's a proxy for something else. Data centers are associated with AI and the AI billionaires were seen with Trump and Musk has his own baggage. Data centers are apparently being built but unless you go look them up online, I doubt most people know where they are even (and I don't know if those maps are accurate). What will happen is the AI billionaires and tech will politically realign and then it suddenly won't be an issue anymore.
People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
This might be the case, but it's not going to stop the technology from stealing your jobs. Billionaires in countries like China are going to leap frog over the US in terms of technology or the billionaires here will just build there instead.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
It's fairly easy to see how having your local government spying on you could be a problem. It's much harder to see how a government on the other side of the world spying on you is a problem.
According to The Reverse Centaur’s Guide,[1] capital investment in AI is so high that the only possible way for the investments to make enough (and to avoid a bubble) is if whole classes of jobs are automated wholesale. And of course that Capital then takes the saved money from that. Maybe some people dislike datacenters-for-AI based on that. Because it’s all part of the same scheme.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
Most people probably don't do that much research on these things. But they have heard about water shortages, and they have all been exposed to horror stories from around the world about data centers causing pollution, or horrifying noise, or whatever. Is the nature of the news cycle.
i get the impression that comment was tongue in cheek, but my unironic opinion is that AI is bad for humanity, and it's good and correct to oppose data centers on the grounds that AI is bad.
Replacing human jobs should be the dream of all people. You want humans doing drudgery when it could be automated by machines? Why?
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
Yea thats fine but you think they will distribute the wealth to you in particular?
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
LLMs would have no value if not for the huge amount of "publicly available data" they took, from the fruits of our labor, without compensation, to train their models.
That would be true under a good economic system. Instead we have a system where the benefits are reaped by the few, and the masses get to either work or starve. Taking away the "work" option is, needless to say, offensive to those.
> I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
This is explicitly about manual labor. The things on the verge of being automated are precisely not in the "sweeping a slushy crossing" category. If Wilde was here to see the things the slop-peddlers are calling art, he'd be distraught.
We are automating the writing of boilerplate code, the resolution of merge conflicts, the scraping of disparate sources of information for structured data, etc. All of that is "sweeping a slushy crossing".
Did you miss the whole "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards that were all over SF?
Or Microsoft's AI chief's "I think we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So, white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer — either being, you know, a lawyer, or an accountant, or a project manager, or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Or Dario's "software engineering will be fully automated in 12 months" or "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs"
Or Altman's “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me... On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”
Either you've been living under a rock, or you're pretending to be ignorant.
Yes, not living in SF I did miss the SF billboards. You’re very insulting to non-SF folks, you know that? Perhaps I am neither “living under a rock” nor “pretending” anything?
The others speak to human labor shifting. Word processors wiped out the typist profession, but that is not the same as wiping out jobs in general. The corporate goal of WordStar, WordPerfect, etc, was never to cause unemployment for typists, even if that was the effect.
You still didn’t cite anything supporting the claim that these companies have a goal of causing mass unemployment. You’re choosing to interpret observations in a way that maximizes your confirmation bias. IMO it is equally valid to interpret those statements as envisioning shifting human work to higher value areas.
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
Because in Ontario, where his mansion is located, the government hasn't been approving such projects and is facing pressure not to. (https://globalnews.ca/news/12134754/ford-government-to-appro...) Even if the province approved, the lake community surrounding his mansion might not want one, for all the same reasons that the US voters in the source article don't want one.
This land he's building it on is cheap and I look forward to my county using it to advantage everyone. Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?"
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
Deportations were big under Obama, I am not sure of the data under Biden. America is strong against illegal immigration. Democratic or Republican I think you are not discussing this in good faith.
Yes, Obama's terms acting as the "deporter in chief" is a common point brought up by conservatives. However, it contrasts with the current Democratic party.
Notice how much of the rhetoric against ICE was specifically "ripping communities apart" and not just "masked police" or "they may make mistakes". Much of the party is fundamentally against deportations, even of illegal immigrants.
The polling reflects those too, the majority of Americans are actually against deporting illegal aliens, unless they've commit a(nother) crime while residing in the country.
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.
Are you saying they're going to construct the data center then move it to a different location? Or are you suggesting they're going to change the laws of physics so that sound propagates differently?
I'm saying that just because they say that they will generate their own electricity, or require less water than a farm, doesn't mean that they will continue to do so into the future.
All of these counter points? Do you think they're going to pull a fast one and move the building hundreds of miles at the last second into someone's back yard? What about water? Are they going to at the last minute change the cooling from a closed loop system? This is going to use 162 million gallons less per year than the farm. How in the world is the DC going to burn through that much extra water at the last minute? Are they going to pull a fast one on us and just hook the building into the grid? What are you talking about?
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
1. Closed loop water systems use chemicals that can leech out of the system. There is 100% going to be more discoveries as time goes on with such a fast build out. Maybe not enough to make it not worthwhile? But not 100% safe either.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
No, I just know how business works. When you are doing something like this you establish the bare minimum as the baseline, get your foot in the door, then start testing boundaries.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.
At this point I really can't see any other justification. The amount of misinformation and hysteria around this issue is like nothing I've seen before.
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.