alt Hacker NewsSo, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).