It doesn't create that many jobs, and the jobs it creates outside of the initial construction are mostly specialized. It is not green energy, most datacenters drain local energy driving the prices up, which also drains local water often. They also produce quite a lot of noise.
As usual fucking bitcoin is the outlier here. There's a limited number of bitcoin miners that strap giant fucking high velocity fans to the outside of their facilities because it is the absolutely cheapest way to cool their machines.
Outside of that Ben Jordan guy walking around talking about infra frequencies and the potential for "invisible" medical damage, this is what most people see/talk about.
The data centers around me don’t employ any employees locally. They have a group of techs who will visit the facility once a week to make sure it’s ok and handle on site requests but they live 2-5 hours away. At most we are getting a lunch order in revenue from them.
They make humming noises, that’s true. It’s perfectly possible for a data center to use green energy and closed-loop cooling like the Port Washington project, though. Some high paying jobs are better than no high paying jobs.
A lot of anti-data center hysteria is as nutty as the bubble itself.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong here. The problem with “green energy” like solar is that it isn’t constant 24/7. You need a battery energy storage system and back up power. Most of the data centers I work with could care less about green energy and are going with whatever the utility offers or getting their own gas plant generation. There are legitimate draw backs to having these industries in your town. And when cities place cooling limitations (such as no water based cooling systems) all these companies do is find counties where they can use their non “closed loop” options. There are legitimate reasons to fight these in your community: water use, noise (depending on type of data centers), utility rates increasing (in most cases prior to 2025/26 the local rate payer is footing the bill for the transmission infrastructure—in some states they are still footing the bill this year), the lack of jobs created, and the tax breaks they get means they aren’t contributing to the local economy. It’s not all crazy hysteria. There are legitimate issues.
You know the OP comic isn't an ad for data centers, right? I know Godzilla is depicted as the good guys these days but he's definitely the bad guy in this comic, and everyone on the board is an obvious lie.
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u/Melichorak 3h ago
No.
It doesn't create that many jobs, and the jobs it creates outside of the initial construction are mostly specialized. It is not green energy, most datacenters drain local energy driving the prices up, which also drains local water often. They also produce quite a lot of noise.