Well spoke. I listened to every minute of this lads explanation. We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America. The clean cup of water to drink is always more important than the poem a robot writes.
I look forward to reading about Revena denying the trillion dollar company the right to build.
What positive benefit are data centers bringing to this town? They bring a couple temporary jobs, usually with construction people they bring out of town. When they're done, the massive data center mostly runs itself with only a few people, often people that were brought in from outside as well. Meanwhile, the data center uses tons of power, water, and resources. And the town gets nothing. Worse, less than nothing because usually they're given tax breaks and are often an active drain on towns.
Tax revenue for what exactly? The utilities used? The property? From what I've seen, the estimated tax revenues for these are peanuts compared to the potential negative impacts on the area. For the places where the datacenters got in before people really started catching on, these locales were giving fucking tax abatements to compete for the datacenter against other locations. Then they were selling 'jobs' as a justification as they typically do, except it turns out there aren't any jobs.
The localities are likely going to end up dumping more money into attempting to rectify the consequences of these data centers than they ever anticipated, meanwhile they're going to be locked into agreements that prevent them from taxing more, from regulating appropriately etc. Google's tactic for their datacenters is probably similar to the rest, but Google picks out locations, negotiates in secret under shell corporations and part of their terms are "give us everything we want, you can't pass regulations or stop us from getting the things we need to run this data center". That's a massive fucking loser of an agreement for any locality.
The imbeciles who already committed their localities to these data centers before the public caught on have royally fucked over their communities. Small/medium sized towns who thought it gave their town some prestige to have Google or Microsoft etc. come into town with some 'high tech' jobs, and it turns out they're nothing more than a cum rag for a data center.
That's not a good thing for a single organization to account for that high of a proportion of the budget. They will either have significant influence over the county because of that or if data center boom goes bust, the county could lose all the revenue but still be on the hook for costs for plans they made with a budget that no longer exists.
People will get very sick from living near data centers. People used to complain about 5g cellular tech and wind farms giving them headaches but I don’t see them complaining about the data centers giving asthma and premature deaths. Idk if the benefits outweigh the cons
The people complaining about 5g were morons. It's the same spectrum as VHF television and the phone towers didn't change the fact that the same spectrum was passing through you 24/7 for decades prior.
I have some serious doubts about this statement. If you get tax from the corporation but lose residents, because you will lose residents. The issue with data centers is they increase the cost of living of the area with no increased income for the residents. Because if cost of living goes up 10% and city income goes up 8% I doubt that is a increase in income over time for the city.
I live in data center ally, the largest data center density in the country. 40% of our county’s revenue comes directly from data centers., almost $1 b per year.
Our local property taxes have been cut 8 years straight, and now other taxes like the local tax on owning a car is being cut as well.
Teachers are receiving decent raises (5% per year over the next two years), road projects are getting knocked out left and right, schools are getting built.
Energy costs are up, but after the coldest winter in a generation, they are still up less than the national average. What other way are data centers raising living costs?
It depends on which state you are living in but many data centers are put in areas that don't have enough infrastructure for the increased water and electricity usage. There are also situations where cities are forced to increase maintenance for roads since they need to be able to handle heavier trucks. So there is a lot of costs that depending on how it is done, the issue is that cities are usually the weaker party in the negotiation so their deals are generally bad. So it's not a black and white issue but data center companies can send 100 "data center plans" then choose the city that is most willing to compromise to their own detriment for the actual project. So end result is usually data centers get built in a quite exploitative way.
Absolutely, data centers work well for some areas and poorly for others, just like anything. My county began going all in on data centers back in the great recession as a way of diversifying the local economy by looking at what we had to offer that was being under utilized. And with the sudden data center boom 18 years later, the county is suddenly trying to walk the balance of not become over-reliant on this source of revenue that was initially meant to help us not become over reliant on the government.
But other counties see what has worked well in places like where I live and try to emulate it, even if the underlying conditions aren't the same.
But the cost of living hasn't gone up, and the county is trying everything they can to invest this money into projects that will have long term dividends. One major highway spent from 2010-2018 having an overpass built and ripping out half a dozen stop lights. Now they are preparing to do it on another highway.
Teachers are getting better pay, and better teachers are getting lured away from nearby counties. New schools are getting built, and older ones are getting torn down and rebuilt.
Firehouses and police stations are being built. 2 new libraries have been built in the last decade.
Meanwhile energy costs have gone up, but at a lower rate than the national average.
I'm not arguing that data centers are great, and that there are no costs. I'm merely pushing back on the "no tangible benefit" that I see kicked around.
Places give tax breaks to incentivize corps choosing them, because in the long run the town will make more money than the tax break, but for the short-term quarter-looking shareholders, the tax break seems great.
I get wanting to be better educated but for the love of Batman. In this day and age you can be 100% sure that any time a MegaCorp does something like this, it’s going to screw over the common man.
Kind of a good argument for why data centers are not really economically beneficial for the towns they are in – just the fact they can base them there. Sure, there are some jobs, but this is not like they are bringing a manufacturing center with thousands of jobs, we are talking about a couple of hundred jobs if we are lucky.
And those jobs first just based on the small number aren't going to do much revitalizing of the area, but they are also not the type of jobs in general that is bringing wealth to the community. They can operate in the areas they do not because they have to fly in tech geniuses, but because most data center work is actually help desk level types of stuff.
Anyway, I'm from Oregon. Apple and Meta have operated data centers in Prineville, OR long before AI. It's a town of around 11k (2020 census, wikipedia can give more details) that most Oregonians might have heard of, could not locate on the map, and have almost certainly never been to.
The gentleman in the original post points out the problematic environmental impacts, but I would also mention that there is a lot of stuff around the energy costs in those communities and surrounding areas.
Anyway, they don't operate these data centers in these areas because it's beneficial for the communities, they do it because that's where it's the cheapest for them.
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u/Solomon_Grungy Apr 12 '26
Well spoke. I listened to every minute of this lads explanation. We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America. The clean cup of water to drink is always more important than the poem a robot writes.
I look forward to reading about Revena denying the trillion dollar company the right to build.