alt Hacker News> USA appears to have weird inversion from how things could be done
The US has a corruption problem, which is not exceptional - I don't know what place you're comparing the US to that doesn't give the rich money and the right of way where and when they want.
People say it's a "race to the bottom" without realizing what that implies. It implies that data centers will simply get deals in localities that will not benefit from data centers if other places demand that they at least pay for themselves. Why would that happen? It happens because it will personally benefit the people who have been charged with making the decision.
> Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place"
Again, compared to who? You think they'll have an easier time in Europe? You think if they want to build them in Peru that the residents will benefit?
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Because of how certain things are less flexible in many european countries, the required scale of corruption to change the rules the way they apparently are bent in USA specifically on this topic becomes impractical.
Note, I am saying specifically on this topic, I am not saying there are no other kinds of grift available.
But I have done recently a deep dive and for example in Poland, especially in the area around Warsaw, a high power datacenter is literally one of the best investments you can get, and the only real issue is to force the builder to use certain noise abatement technologies to deal with the low-frequency noise.
And while it's a race to the bottom, that does not mean that there are no other variables than price - for example, outside of AI, a large boom in EU datacenter space is due to DORA and NIS2 regulations that place certain requirements on locality and resilience
I think you are getting at something here. The benefit piece. The proximity to community. But the society in the US is not structured in a way to make this happen. Municipality is basically a bad word at this point. But imagine localized network, compute, green energy, battery etc.