alt Hacker NewsBuilding stuff is good stewardship. We complain about NIMBYs. But with a few relatively modest regulations data centers can be quite friendly. They don’t generate traffic, congestion, etc. They don’t strain school or police infrastructure. Basically need some noise regulations. But the NIMBYs will kill it.
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They need more than "we will prioritize". They need to act. They need to source power _today_, not just promise at some point in the future they'll probably fund a power plant, while raising rates for human consumers in the short, medium, and long term, for example.
Factories were originally located near housing (or vice versa) because the factories needed lots of workers. This doesn't apply to data centres. They don't need to be near anybody's home, so why should anyone be obliged to suffer their externalities? Just build your data centre somewhere else.
Data centers would be a benefit if my power bill and property taxes didn’t jump to subsidize the tax breaks my city gave them. I don’t want to pay for infrastructure multi-billion dollar companies should be funding.
This seems like an entirely predictable outcome of data center builders and operators behaving like anti-social neighbors with noise just because no law prevented them from doing so.
Building a data center near homes and running your incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7 for months, destroying the property values and quality of life for the people living there, is a giant middle finger to the community they've moved into. I'm not saying the backlash banning them entirely rather than adding some additional regulations is entirely logical, but it's very understandable. And should have been eminently predictable.
Citizens having a say in what is going on in their neighborhood is now controversial. Big brother knows best.
NIMBY is largely used for housing development discussions and to contort it in support of developing data centers is incredibly intellectually dishonest.
If we're going to rebrand things to blur lines, I propose rebranding data centers to pedophile content hubs.
The rest of your argument is full of similar cherry-picking for dishonest discourse.
They don’t generate any value for local communities either!
An extremely large dark black box. A haunted house on steroids. Not so quietly humming 24/7. Polluting the air from the large scale mobile gensets. Sucking in all the water and electric power so that the residential rates are going up and up.
I'm all for the datacenters, the more the better, it is the great race of acceleration of our civilization. Yet, it is pretty clear, and with history being the witness, that the tech-bros and MBAs will build it without any regard for the well-being of impacted communities. Thus we have the game of what communities will [be forced to] take a one for the team.
And this is why space base datacenters will be a thing :)
Not all things built are positive, so it can't be good stewardship just to build. And is the reason they don't strain infra because they don't meaningfully improve the community or its economy?