>A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.
Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.
That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.
In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.
It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.
In my part of Ohio, everything big enough for a meaningful solar farm is "prime" farmland or coveted and necessary forest or wetlands -- unless it's already used for business, or housing, or infrastructure to support civilization.
Perhaps my perspective is simply very limited, but: In my estimation, there is no unused land to use.
Even the big pile of dirt I drive by twice a day: It does stuff. It gets bigger and smaller as some pay to get rid of extra dirt from their project, and others pay to buy some of that dirt for a different project. Someone somewhere manages that pile of dirt.
Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.
Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.
Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.
You mean precisely like xAI did in Memphis? Build on the site of an abandoned factory—a historically disadvantaged, low-income industrial zone?
I couldn't imagine anyone having anything negative to say about that.
The problem with what xAI is doing in Memphis is they were originally running "temporary" generators for over a year (effectively permanently ...) without meeting emission requirements a permanent generator would need to.
Sure, it's not xAI's fault the local power grid isn't suitable for their datacenter but the problem here is that xAI is effectively not following the law.
Indiana is about 23 million acres.
And then there are the zoning and city regulations which naturally resist. You would think they would welcome a new taxpayer, but they're really in love with the regulations that someone wrote decades ago. The odds of getting them to bend is anyone's guess, but in most cases a bribe or ten is going to be required.
Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.