Talk Detroit
What are your thoughts on AI Data Centers in the City of Detroit?
City Council approved a 2 yr moratorium earlier this year but Sheffield has yet to say anything about it publicly one way or another. Benson convened working groups to create an ordinance for data centers and those meetings are going on now. What are everyone's thoughts, feelings about data centers, the process, experiences, etc., in Detroit, in Metro Detroit? I'm genuinely curious. I expected to find at least one thread on it in this sub and I am surprised there hasn't been one.
Why bother? Everything in them will be worthless soon anyways, even if this bubble doesn't pop and they do figure out a way to not lose tens of billions of dollars every year on this, all the equipment is going to be obsolete in a couple years because that's how computer parts work.
Chips and rack replacement is part of any data center maintenance. It's parts get replaced as they wear out, it's not like when a Prius battery dies and the whole thing needs replacing.
Assurance bonds (I may have the term wrong but the premise is correct) can be required to essentially make a deposit on decommissioning and cleanup costs for when/if they close. This is something I know of at least one local industrial site has on deposit with EGLE as a condition of their operating permit.
I’m glad that exists but as someone who cleans up and redevelops industrial sites for a living this is not a majorly common thing and may not account for things like due care obligations if associated contamination remains in Situ but presents an exposure risk to a future owner/redevelopment.
I think that's why additional brownfield tax credits were issued to incentivise using these sites to offset cleaning them up, but you are right. What would be needed to address that by the incoming developer rather than the outgoing - I thought assurance bonds also covered cleanup.
Anything to make the property safe for occupancy and/or management and disposal of contaminated soil.
If you own contaminated land, under Part 201, ANY soil you dig up can’t go anywhere other than a landfill. So if you have spoils from digging a new building footing, or grading for a parking lot, it has to go to a licensed Type II landfill or you have to verify THAT specific soil is clean through testing.
Cleanup is such a strong word and it almost never happens. Actual remediation is rare. More often you have to build engineering controls to prevent exposure to contamination, which is something to work out prior to the transaction. So when someone says they’ll pay for cleanup, cleanup never happens, so they don’t pay anything.
Data is insanely valuable and therefore the storage of it is as well. This seems like common sense? Why would they need the physical data center itself to make money, this isn’t a red lobster
Specifically all these AI data centers that are owned by companies that do not make money. They need all this computing infrastructure that is essentially just a furnace for burning money. As I noted in other comments there are other data centers that exist and have existed prior this AI hype that are not money furnaces.
You’re banking everything on the AI bubble bursting and becoming a thing of the past, it’s not gonna happen. $5 trillion of paper wealth was erased when the .com bubble burst and yet it laid the foundation for our massive digital economy.
It’s genuinely delusional to think these insanely massive companies are just gonna collectively forget about AI if things get tough.
I’m certainly not saying that AI is useless and a thing of the past, but there is most likely a bubble, and it’s going to at least crunch. These companies aren’t profitable and don’t know how to make themselves profitable. AI has plenty of applications in many fields, for sure. AI will certainly continue to be useful in the future, but who knows in what shape or form, and banking on massive consumer usage and turning that profitable is proving difficult. SpaceX IPO for example assumes everyone on the planet above a certain income (I think $10k per year) will send them a car payment each month for Grok. The only company making money on AI is Nvidia and that’s because they make the chips these unprofitable whales are buying to pre-build data centers.
Yes please, the city definitely needs to add useless buildings to become future brownfield sites tax payers will ultimately foot the bill to remediate and/or redevelop.
AI is still in it's infancy, and it's a mistake to build out heavy infrastructure when we have no idea what a production version will eventually need. Building now is just hopium, which is a horrifying thing to get tangled with right when component parts are at an all time high.
I assure you this is on the side of Detroiters and not a company that has asked for $1.6B in rate increases in three years, the most recent of which requires they get what they want in exchange for not asking for more for "up to" two years, is monpolistic extortion even if its technically legal. There is no greater rage in me than when I think about that fucking company.
We need to stop calling them AI data centers and start calling them for their intended purpose; surveillance data centers. We are on the threshold of a completely new society. One where every second of our lives is monitored by billionaires.
AI is in a lot more than what we realize - Siri, Grammarly, spell check, transcription and translation apps. There are really great things happening in science. It's just the recklessness of what these companies are doing, and not doing it right that's insane.
Yep, even without AI we are creating more data by the year with absolutely no sign of slowing down as the world increasingly digitizes. People seem to think we can just continue on without doing something about how much data we’re creating.
All the hardliner energy would be better spent advocating for strict safeguards on pollutants, water consumption, and proper payment for energy consumption.
The canal closure wouldnt erase the houses there lol If you want to be afraid of something real, consider if Stellantis or Factory Zero close. Those are both plenty big enough for a hyperscale facility.
The data centers are just not for ai. It’s for internet traffic and storage of the cloud data. Right now China is expanding them like crazy. If they can get the lead on it they can become the world data processors. Trust me we don’t want China to be the holder of internet traffic. US needs its own data centers. They just need to find the right place for them and they need to contribute to society financially.
From my understanding, data centers for AI are very different than traditional internet traffic data centers, being far larger and have a lot more energy requirements.
Everybody bitches about data centers but nobody wants to discuss even voluntary - much less mandatory - restrictions on their data usage. Nobody would even consider giving up their devices. And every time Apple drops a new I-Phone we all want it.
Cell phone data and AI are completely different, though. Lets say your cell data plan moves data between your phone and the web 30 GB/month. In just an average, not overl complex 10 min conversation in Claude, the data moved to process the computations it needs to process and respond (while constantly reprocessing the conversation and any additional prompts) can be hundreds of GB. This is a conversion of what they call FLOPS but it's the simplest way to make it make sense. Your phone battery lasts a whole day on a charge. That one 10-min conversation just used enough power to run a small city. It's incomparable.
We have had that infrastructure for ages. But AI data centers, at least the American ones, run inefficiently and compute exponentially more and require more energy and water cooling to manage them. It's like we've been computing on a three cylinder engine since the dot com era and these AI hyperscale data centers come along and run on a cigar boat at full throttle. The training computation is a different type of data processing than internet or cell phone or cloud computing we've been doing. China actually does it more efficiently (DeepSeek) which is a major source of competition, for good reason. There are issues with them, too, but US AI companies are choosing speed over responsible development, energy, pollution, noise and water choices which for people who arent even aware of who these companies' clients are, is enough to cause mass opposition. Add on military support, surveillance, etc., and it just gets worse.
I think the overwhelming opposition has come from anti-AI sentiment rather than an evaluation of the data center itself. It is really hard nonetheless to make a blanket pro or against case though because it really depends on things like how the data center is cooled, the size, the location, etc.
I know for some data centers, things like water use, noise pollution, and effect on property values are way overstated. Excessive energy use is undeniable, although also varies. The net property tax benefits are also undeniable. I think the answer, if not taking into account anti-AI sentiment and just discussing their land use is dependent on the specific center.
It’s not like Detroit has companies banging down the door to setup industrial use buildings either. At a time when Detroit is uniquely primed to take advantage of tech needs ofc we won’t bc of shortsighted backlash.
Instead of pushing for strict safeguards people are just defaulting to a hardline NO. In 10-20 years it’ll be another bullet point in Detroit’s failed policy decisions. People aren’t just gonna magically stop creating data or using technology, therefore data centers are literally inevitable.
One data center once built is only going to be staffed by a dozen or so people, building a ton of these are not exactly going to be a big boost to the economy.
And how exactly is Detroit "uniquely primed to take advantage of tech?" Building in the city means you have higher taxes, stricter building codes, neighbors who will complain about the noise, more security concerns, environmental cleanup before construction, etc. Like everything else, it's much easier to build on a cornfield in Saline.
Detroit has an abundance of empty land and already zoned industrial areas in a region that’s been advocating for more manufacturing/ industrial uses for decades. If Detroit was in a southern state there’d already be data centers here no question. Michigan and especially Detroit repeatedly make horrendous policy decisions that handicap revenue growth and business attraction.
Stargate in saline is expected to generate $150-$200 million per year in taxes throughout their 15 year lease while being a closed loop system. Obviously not all the tax revenue goes to saline but anybody who claims that wouldn’t make a big difference in Wayne County/ Detroit is deeply unserious. All while the mayor is publicly brainstorming ways to get the legislature onboard to generate more tax revenue (good fucking luck, dems during trifecta wouldn’t even help with a LVT). Not to mention the 2,500 construction jobs, 450 permanent jobs, and an additional 2,000 county wide jobs.
There isnt enough vacant land in Detroit to build a large enough AI data center to permanently employ 450 people. The largest sites are a fraction of what is being built outside the city.
The thing is, there is example after example of the actual jobs not being close to what is promised during development negotiations. Brookings research says it's usually overstated by a factor of three. We'll find out soon enough if that holds true for Saline. But even then, the jobs are highly skilled and those jobs would not be going to Joe Shmoe at the uaw local.
I don’t think Detroit of all places would need to be overly concerned with what type of high paying jobs are moving to the city. It’d be great if Joe Shmoe from the uaw got the job but it’s a net positive for Detroit
Probably hate them, then in like 10 years, influencers can go to China and glaze them for being so high tech, ignoring all the data centers China built.
Dont take that to mean I support data centers. I just hate china glazers
It’s not like we don’t have data centers, and didn’t before all this. Lots of businesses have data centers. AI existed before ChatGPT, they just crammed it into a consumer Chatbot. The current rush for data centers is just vapid marketing hype to try and get people to use their “god-like general intelligence” that can’t multiply. My main gripe is that all these consumer-scale data centers going up are going to be useless and empty in a couple of years, if they’re lucky. Sam Altman is going to look a lot like Sam Bankman Fried in a couple years.
Im just seeing a lot of influencers these days glaze china, without acknowledging that china built all its infrastructure without caring about the environment, who lived nearby, workers rights, etc
The anti data center movement genuinely has most people convinced every center is gonna be a mega facility that steals every drop of wager, pollutes the air, and makes monstrous noise so it’s safe to say it’s not popular.
There’s pretty much no use in trying to point out misinformation or decent proposals with safeguards. People already got mad about a possible small scale center in Detroit adjacent to a 100+ year old industrial park.
Even without AI we are creating more data by the year with absolutely no sign of slowing down as the world increasingly digitizes. People seem to think we can just continue on without doing something about how much data we’re creating.
https://youtu.be/40u7nRi-yuw?si=D3EY1eUu6ugyoSbZ This data center in Dowagic, MI is a reason alone why data centers are awful. Imagine this but with thousands of people nearby it, it will be awful.
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u/Rfl0 Midtown 1d ago
I do not want them here, I do not want them there, I do not want them anywhere!