Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers | Hacker News Reader

Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

wpr.org

336 pointssseagull362 comments

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.

I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:

> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.

I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?

Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.

There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.

I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?

The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying

Don't give them any ideas

Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.

But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.

Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.

the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too

Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior…

Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.

Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?

Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work

By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...

Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.

Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.

But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.

Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.

Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).

Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.

As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.

> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.

https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-economy?utm_s...

What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.

What kind of say do the residents have when it’s nearly a done deal?

Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto, they’re just speaking into the void as far as the company is concerned.

Typically constituents don’t have any ability to veto. I imagine there are some cases in CA, thinking of that amusing article about an ice cream shop getting blocked by another ice cream shop.

It’s usually an indirect vote with your voice. To be frank, people don’t have that much of a role in what business gets built if it aligns with the states economic goals and zoning is not being critically changed.

I think the bigger discussion is if resources are going to be constrained can we make sure the use is being properly charged for resource buildout. It’s the same problem with building sports arenas or sweetheart tax deals for manufacturing plants, they often don’t pan out.

Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.

You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.

> data centers are the current evil entity.

There's a reason for that: they compete for resources but contribute relatively little back to the local economy. In that sense they're quite different from previous large corporate investments in a local area.

Again, I think it’s a muddy example. I have yet to see compelling data that on average data center are meaningfully raising rates and most of the rate increases are more due to the aging infrastructure in America that was neglected for too long.

If anything these should be examples on the failure of how these resources are being sold and good opportunity to build a better system.

I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.

It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.

It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.

Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors, either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to have some insight and input, same as they have input into whether a high density hog farm can open right on the border of the community.

Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethical issue. I agree its not proper for permits to be withheld on purely ethical grounds, laws should be passed instead. But there are a lot of side-effects to having a datacenter near your property that are entirely concrete issues.

Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided they didn't want it.

Why shouldn't permits be withheld on ethical grounds? Isn't that just giving permission for companies to be unethical and get away with it?

If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally applicable law that provides for such penalties. Withholding permission to do random things based on ad hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for corruption.

I agree with you. this should be handled by the legislative process. but we should also agree that secret deals announced as a fiat acompli are pretty fertile ground for corruption also

Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur. You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to think that the laws on the books can cover every situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.

I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh the benefits of individual government actors having arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen clearly on the federal level this past year, once you create that discretion, the common way for corporate executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and deserve favorable treatment is not good behavior but open bribery of public officials.

Bribery is illegal. What hope do you have for due process and the rule of law when it is being carried out as it is now? You can't use an extraordinary case to justify your belief about the ordinary case.

Also, we don't live in a world adjudicated by machines, there will always be discretion and the potential for special favors. No matter how much you tie the hands of regulators there will be some actor who will have the power to extort. Not to mention that regulation is not opposed to due process and the rule of law, but is the most important component of both.

Imagining a world without discretion is imagining a world where corporations can do as much irreparable harm as they want as long as there isn't a law against it.

> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center

This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it, make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits, noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These massive data centers are a new kind of business that most communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the states are starting to add some more rules about transparency, which seems like a step in the right direction for making better deals for all involved.

The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal. Partially because so many of the deals were done under cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any development. The way these companies act will only increase NIMBYism.

> Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

Trusting large corporations to provide a full and accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.

> If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules.

Ironically this is a recipe for how you get nothing built. Zoning laws are much more potent than people showing up at city council meetings.

> Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?

In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.

> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at

This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.

Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?

Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.

How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?

For such a massive long term impact, people should vote directly. That's ideal, and its pretty realistic ideal especially with 800 votes which are trivial to count.

If course its not ideal for the company investing. Then the question becomes if rights/wishes of people are above of those of companies. Often, in Europe they are not, and often in US they are, exceptions notwithstanding.

> How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice?

Find a small town politician, bribe them. Corruption pure and simple with no chance for accountability. The economically strong predate on the economically weak.

It‘s preying on the city‘s desperation to get a cash payout, to get space and utilities worth much more. Facebook abuses its market power to pit city governments against each other, while the cities don‘t have many alternatives.

Does the mayor sell land or electricity now? That’s not how one gets space or utilities.

Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic abuse in siting movies and TV

Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.

So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:

* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

> use too much ground water

Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.

The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?

Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.

These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.

"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.

Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.

Ummm, I live in Wisconsin (since 1996), and that isn't how that works at ALL.

Can you make more substantive comments besides saying "wrong!" ? I don't disagree with your claim but it's extremely low effort and adds nothing to the conversation.

Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.

Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.

They use evaporative cooling towers because you need far fewer of them. The evaporating water can be separate from the main cooling loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower#Heat_transfer_me...

A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe the public.

Charge them more for water and electricity until they're using the amount of water you think is right.

The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.

Yup, and the abuse of NDA's compounds the issue

I'd rather have something to eat or take a shower at home than talk to an LLM.

Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry... (hurting the people directly)

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.

Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.

So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.

The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.

If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.

The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:

- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles

We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.

I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?

Larry Fink is personally responsible for more insane progressive policies and pogroms in publicly traded companies than any other single individual. Historically, maybe Lenin was worse. Brendan Eich, father of JavaScript, was excommunicated from Mozilla for having private opinions not in line with the progressive ersatz religion. You’re not being serious here.

There is nothing grass roots about “AI will cause drought and famine” nonsense coming from the infotainment content mills. I don’t blame anyone for keeping their work out of the hostile press.

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.

Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.

Pay them more then

Very few people work in datacenters

so datacenters should be allowed to come into communities, consume their resources and barely hire the local populace?

What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters of homes. It's absolutely insane.

EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE

Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.

Arguably, an 800 person town is likely quite far from most.

I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].

Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

"Tragedy of the commons" is suffering from people overusing it.

> Everybody wants X to exist

Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.

An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.

Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid.

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.

^ This right here.

The only way this makes sense for communities is as a kind of "finder's fee", i.e. you might argue that if BigTechOne™ knew that they'd have to bid against BigTechTwo™ they'd never even bother to scope out the location.

Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.

> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY

Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.

It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.

The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."

It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.

My rate has been consistently 40-60% higher over the last year independent of weather

Your rate, or your bill? I'm seeing people complain about their bills. None of them ever come back and discuss how much of the change was due to changes in their rate versus changes in their usage.

They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media.

Ironic.

Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.

When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.

I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.

> Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word

> It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt

> And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal

They say trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback

"Doing that would fail to align with the company's current priorities. And by the way - you're fired." -Catbert

it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

I'm not sure. Cities are supposed to approve or deny applications based on whether they comply with zoning, codes, parking, water availability etc. They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone. A city near me is dealing with a lawsuit for exactly that.

It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.

> They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone

They absolutely can and do this. Ask to put an adult entertainment store next to a school/church. Ask to put a liquor store next to a school/church. The city will say no.

Right, because zoning and state laws forbid those things.

That's probably a zoning issue, though..

Cities can largely do what they want. They can deny applications for whatever reason they want. Citizen concerns are very important here (they need to keep voters happy to keep their jobs). But their main mandate is to protect the public good. If a project isn’t in the interest of their community, they ca deny it.

Whether or not it’s legal is another question. And NIMBY and… and… there are lots of potential concerns. But this article is about Wisconsin, where the question is really what are we going to do with this land and how are going to power it.

Your post mentions a lawsuit near you. This is a feature, not a bug. Even if the city is unlawfully denying an application, the denial still has the desired effect — a de facto denial for the length of time it takes to resolve in the courts. By dragging out the time for a lawsuit to be resolved, the city hopes that the developer will just go away and find someplace else.

This is in the context of not knowing the entity behind the application, and evaluating it on its merits alone. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Kindof like evaluating a resume without knowing the name or gender of the applicant.

Cities are bound by laws, and not complying opens them up to lawsuits which the taxpayers pay for. Sure, maybe that's in the best interest of the community in some cases. However, I think it usually happens because people have feelings and biases rather than as a calculated move.

> evaluating it on its merits alone

It’s evaluating proposal by the words of the applicant alone.

In addition to exaggeration on resumes, people tend to not include inconvenient stuff. Reputation is definitely part of the merit.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.

If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.

Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.

---

Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?

If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.

> I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies,

See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential election. Reputations were on full display.

Doesn’t that further defeat the argument for secrecy here?

The argument was that people's collective judgment, given transparency, will result in good decisions.

But we see from the Nov 2024 elections (and others, but most glaringly that one), that that is, sadly, not true.

So the people rejecting Facebook because of Facebook's reputation tells you nothing about whether Facebook is bad, because the people could have just as easily been bad.

> Reputations were on full display.

The problem is that many people liked what they saw. Reputation was still important, but there were different beliefs about what reputations were desirable.

Yes, exactly my point.

I was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply changed their minds/laws.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-county-...

> In 2016, West Jordan City sought to land a Facebook data center by offering large tax incentives to the social media giant. That deal ultimately fell through amid opposition by Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and a vote of conditional support by the Utah Board of Education that sought to cap the company’s tax benefits.

> That project went to New Mexico, which was offering even richer incentives.

> Three months after the Utah negotiations ended, state lawmakers voted in a special session to approve a sales tax exemption for data centers. The move was seen by many as another attempt to woo Facebook to the Beehive State.

So basically they first said "No", lost the bid, had FOMO so they passed new laws to attract this business.

>Asked about the identity of the company, Foxley said only that it is “a major technology company that wants to bring a data center to Utah.”

>And that vision could soon be a reality, after members of the Utah County Commission voted Tuesday to approve roughly $150 million in property tax incentives to lure an as-yet-unnamed company — that sounds an awful lot like Facebook — to the southern end of Pony Express Parkway.

Seems like a pretty open and obvious secret.

I admit I may be missing broader context about the state, this was specifically from someone working for Eagle Mountain city planning. But the article you've cited is later in the process than what I'm talking about.

> Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!

> why it was needed in ...

"Needed"

I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.

A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.

When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.

A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.

The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.

But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.

I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".

If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.

> you're liable to have holdouts

That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.

Reputation working as designed?

This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here.

I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.

They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.

Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.

The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.

The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.

Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates.

https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...

https://archive.ph/9rY9Z

What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.

Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...

Yep, Northern Virginia gets you close to the BosWash megalopolis and pretty close to better than half of the US population. It also gives you access to a highly educated workforce and pretty much no natural disasters of note.

There's also network (pun intended) effects. Northern Virginia has been a major internet hub for a long time, with the first non-government peering point and a bunch of telecom companies, including AOL.

The data center land isn't that expensive anyway. Northern Virginia can be tremendously expensive, but the data centers are built out in the relative sticks. I'm sure the land would be cheaper in Wyoming, but it's cheap enough.

I was thinking of a slightly different incentiviser, you're right next to the county's largest collection of bought-and-paid-for politicians, if you need the rules bent a little, or a lot, you can point to your data centre off in the distance and remind them what you're paying them for.

Considering the capital costs in fitting out these datacenters, the land being 10x more expensive doesn't move the needle much on total cost.

Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all.

You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.

I know why I, personally, consider eco-friendly power to be ideal; but why would the builder of a DC care?

So they can put it on a page like [1] and [2]

Most large companies impose certain costs on society, and have to manage their reputation. Often it's cheaper to improve public opinion in a peripheral area than to address deep-seated problems.

Putting a data centre close to a hydroelectric dam helps offset your product's impact on users' mental health, your disregard for competition law, etc.

[1] https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/ [2] https://sustainability.atmeta.com/data-centers/

I don't buy that reasoning, even with that desire to manage their reputation:

Those lists are the companies marking their own homework and congratulating themselves as PR, AKA "greenwashing". They can do that just fine by spinning a single metric of their choice where they do less-badly than their pick of mean, median, and mode of whoever else they want to compare themselves against, they don't actually need to be genuinely eco-friendly at anything.

Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.

They dont have any negotiating power -> it is a race to the bottom

Unfortunately for the rust belt states data centers don't bring in a lot of jobs.

No well educated highly paid person wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Wisconsin will never be Seattle, Boston or NYC.

I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It’s easy to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The why is the American development pattern that creates suburbia that can’t generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.

That’s the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in large part, fix the problem.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

However the conspiracy-theory nutters have done a really good job convincing people in the US that 15-minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, "cities", are some plot by George Soros to... actually I have no idea what sort of crazy is being invoked this time, but it seems to have worked, generating enough opposition to liveable cities to make it a real uphill battle to implement them.

A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking.

It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronger emphasis on public transport, bicycles, walking etc. is automatically resisted. The conspiracy theory fits this bias perfectly.

It's not so much that they have "opposition to livable cities," it's that they have different beliefs about what's livable.

Yeah, good point. I was astounded when I lived in the US that it was impossible to get from my temporary accommodation to the place I worked, about 300m away, without driving. I eventually found a place to rent on the one single bus route that served the area. The rental agent treated me with the same level of patience that you use with slightly crazy people.

Certainly US walkability is terrible in general, but what you describe is a fairly extreme scenario. Was it that you had to cross an interstate highway or something like that?

I'm an immigrant to the US - currently looking to emigrate again for obvious reasons! - and I've done a good amount of walking or taking public transit. Walking on the shoulder of strips (i.e. highways with traffic lights and shopping) is not pleasant, but it's doable. Crossing those strips is usually possible at traffic lights.

The wildest thing is that even in smallish towns where you might expect that walking would be supported, it isn't. Town planners generally seem not to consider it at all, at best you get some sidewalks outside shopping areas and then everything else the best you get is a shoulder, and the worst is nothing at all so you're just in the road with the cars.

The US is literally, collectively insane, and what it's going through now is just a natural consequence of that.

The point Strong Towns is making is that whatever you believe, you can’t live outside your means forever. The bill for all that infrastructure will come due, taxes will go up, people who still can will move away, and the town will start falling apart.

I pointed out why it was easy for that conspiracy theory to take hold.

Whether the people who believe it are going to experience consequences in future isn't relevant to that.

IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).

> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.

If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.

That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.

Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.

The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.

I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?

For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.

https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...

A $500m TIF district for a city that takes in $10m annually and holds <$100m in assets? I've seen some really dumb uses for TIFs before but this might just take the cake.

WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote

Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason) but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy them as a means to cut out the voters.

I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions.

The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in the future is very slim.

They primary concern is these centers will force water and energy expansions and those will be equally split.

Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had?

The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.

Power is metered.

If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of the ratepayers then it’s a pricing problem that needs fixing.

The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that capital investment needs to happen at once. You can’t even build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone.

Typically industrial consumers of electricity with predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that’s reflected in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility.

If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation capacity that’s a much larger failure further upstream by regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too for many years. It’s coming for us either way if we want to remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You can only maximize financialization for so long until you need to start actually making stuff again.

> Power is metered.

Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they incur on the system.

Bootstraping is the point. Theres also bulk cost being cheaper, but the analogy is how most utilities work.

To install thd infrastducture everyones bill goes up.

Just curious where you are in ohio and want to do more research. I'm in the Mansfield area.

Miami County. There are datacenter projects outside Piqua and in Shelby County near Sidney.

Thank you!

There is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed?

I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.

I can't wait for cheap RAM and SSDs to flood the market...

> what will they do when these are no longer needed?

Bitcoin—>Altcoin—>NFTs—>StableCoin—>AI—>They'll just invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on.

It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.

I'm not sure it's that linear

https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezue...

The compute will find a use case; if the AI bubble bursts I'm sure all the excess capacity will be rerouted to crypto again. But also, there's still plenty of usage in chatbots or image / video generation, I'm not convinced that will just stop.

A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.

> as they are currently implemented

As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from them.

At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the burden of that cost?

Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some others don't.

Different moral values and such.

Are you using a phone and computer or bank or website that doesn’t have mined materials?

Surely you use things with negative externalities because you get value from them.

You participate in $the_thing so surely you must support $the_thing, right?

I would get value from stealing, I don't steal from people. The argument or question isn't about if it has value to some people, the question is, does the value to some people outweigh the costs that are imposed on others.

Didn’t know you are the complete humanity.

Somebody get daily value from rising food prices, isn’t as good for humanity

You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?

are _you_ capable of consdering the advantages that AI can bring instead of simply focusing on the easy parts like pollution and energy?

AI has incredible potential for both

But the negatives are spiraling out of control. Pollution and energy and the amplification of structural social problems like wealth stratification, authoritarianism, media manipulation...

With great power comes great responsibility, and we're living in an era in which our culture has shifted dramatically towards accepting immoral, short-sighted, and reckless behaviour.

you could have said the same about any technology - industrial revolution, the internet - anything really.

always easy to talk about concerns.

> instead of simply focusing on the easy parts like pollution and energy?

Yeah, I completely agree AI is fantastic with no downsides; as long as you ignore all of it's down sides.

Do you think it's a good thing to ignore the downsides when advocating for something?

Commensurate to the actual cost?

Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.

AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.

I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.

it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms use

> The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption btw.

Compared to the fair market cost of human labor? It might be thousands of times more efficient.

Do you have children? Post some pictures of them so Grok can show us what they look like unclothed and covered in "yogurt".

It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but our ruling class has decided against that.

Let's avoid falling into the trap of assuming the worst of people when replying to comments.

It’s no more useful than when google and stack overflow was at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered. Everything else gen AI is dystopian.

Why not debate me rather than downvotes? Eh hallucinations break my workflow and end up costing me more time debugging then it’s worth.

The most important news is in the subtitle -

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.

I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?

You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.

Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html

I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing this out to show my science teacher decades ago.

Of course it's still around. They're still putting this crap in schools!

Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around

Secrecy needs a time limit.

Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.

They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.

Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules commercial reasons.

If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.

In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.

Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.

> the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

The submitting of corporate largess to multiple government entities for bids is (imo) a de facto hostile act, and should be treated as such.

There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.

But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.

Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.

Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.

OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers, the latter may decide to build outside the city limits. Which might become a problem over time, by holding down Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on their own homes, and Smallville having too little money to afford nice things that they want.

If McD builds outside of Smallville, they don't get any of the services that Smallville taxes subsidize. Smallville taxes serve Smallvillians, not corporate villains.

True. But McD may decide that the services in developer-friendly Small Township are just as good, for their use case. And Smallville residents may be content to drive another 500 yards down Smallville-Littleton Rd., to spend their money at the new McD out in Smallville Twp.

In public policy, everything is a tradeoff.

In which case, one might expect Borger Kong to build in developer-unfriendly Smallville, because they will capture the people driving outside of Smallville. All your arguments are easily countered by basic supply and demand hyoptheticals.

There is no reason that McDonald's shouldn't own the risk of developing a McDonalds, and instead make secret deals with local governments to offset some of that risk. Thats a cost that should be borne by the business.

Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.

It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.

Secret deals with corporations is corruption.

Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.

It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.

There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.

NASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.

Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.

I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.

Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.

Should still be orders different from a the continuous labor intensive manufacturing of F35's

Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.

It's still contract work. When it's over so is your paycheck.

Construction is one of the jobs that's booming nationwide.

For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle.

It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three.

Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.

How big is the business?

In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.

I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.

Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.

There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.

Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.

When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.

Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.

Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been.

And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).

Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".

It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".

At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol

“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

They don’t, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.

The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.

I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

> Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.

I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?

Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).

I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is the percentage increase when used for cooling?

Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.

It's which side of the drainage basin is the water moved to? When the water is flushed back into the system, does it drain back into the Great Lakes? or down to the Gulf of Mexico?

On the southern shore of Lake Michigan, that "few miles" changes the watershed that its part of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Basin ( https://www.erbff.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/10.8.25-Gre... for a high resolution map)

As for diversions that go to evaporative cooling, that's a big question for the data center itself and there are many designs. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/data-center-cooli... has some cutting edge designs, but they're more expensive to use for pumping waste heat elsewhere.

Sometimes you get data centers that look like https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles... ... and that's not a little bit of water there.

While the Great Lakes are coming off of wet years ( https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/waterleveldata/... ) that shouldn't be used as long term prediction of what will be available in another 10 years lest it becomes another Colorado river problem. Currently, the water levels for Lake Michigan are lower than average and not predicted to return to average in the model range. https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/mboglwl/MBOGLWL... . You'll note that this isn't at the minimums from the 1960s... and the Great Lakes Compact was signed in 2008.

You can search the database for the authorized diversions of the water. https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-information/ba...

For example, Nine Mile Point - https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-information/ba...

But where do we stop with all of this endless expansion? Do the great lakes have to go through an Aral Sea type of situation before we decide it's time to stop? It's not like these AI ghouls are shy about wanting infinite expansion and an ever-growing number of data centers to feed their word generators, do we really think that if we just let them have the water now they're not going to abuse that and that they won't start draining the lakes for all the water they can manage? I'm not so optimistic, myself.

I don't recall the exact specifics, but I do remember a while ago there was some outrage that Nestle was bottling some really large sounding amount of water (think ~millions of gallons a day?) from a Great Lake. The math behind how much was being used as a % of lake volume was negligible (it would take ~3,500,000 years to "drain" Michigan at that rate).

In my mind this is partly due to people not understanding large numbers, and also not understanding just how much water is actually in the Great Lakes. It's a huge amount - Lake Michigan has 1,288,000,000,000,000 gallons in it. Every human on earth could use close to 10gal of water per day for the next 50 years before Lake Michigan would be "dry", assuming it was never replenished. And that's just Lake Michigan. (Obviously environmental systems are more complicated than the simple division I did, and individual water usage isn't simply 10gal a day - it's just to demonstrate a point).

Now, someone else pointed out that the tragedy of the commons is a sort of death by a thousand cuts. And if anyone who shows up is allowed to draw millions of gallons a day, that can add up and certainly have negative effects. It's just important to actually understand the scale of the numbers involved, and to not let legitimate environmental concerns be cross-contaminated with just anti-tech-of-the-year sentiment, or political motivations, or whatever else might cloud the waters (pun unintended).

let's hope this holds, i have no reason to expect that in 2026

That only means they have to be built in counties which are part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return the water back to be net-neutral and comply with environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this article calls out is along a fresh water source and does not require Lake Michigan water.

The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.

I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia.

My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".

Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing.

Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.

Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.

Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.

> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?

It’s to run LLMs.

In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.

Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.

>Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money?

Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding.

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...

> “I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.

The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.

fun fact: insider trading in stocks is illegal, but insider trading in real estate is not.

So if someone is even considering buying a big block of land, anyone who knows about it can buy first in the area. That drives confidentiality agreements (which increase the value of being an insider).

Similarly, for large players to make large stock transactions, proceeding through the public markets led to traders seeing the bid/ask volume and act first, making it more costly. That lead to dark pools and off-exchange trading, which has become the majority (in dollar volume) since roughly 2024. So the "public" markets are now just tracking private ones.

Ftfa “ The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages…”

Sounds like it’s not something new or reserved for data enter projects only but I agree it sure seems a shady practice.

Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.

Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.

There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.

Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?

because these entities have lots of money to pay people to convince local government that they should let them build their misery factories within their jurisdictions for "muh tax revenue" (that is paltry because corporate taxes end up being cut in the race to attract these vampires) and "muh jobs" (that usually dry up once the current thing in {industry} dies and the communities get left with the refuse. see also: the fracking and natural gas boom from ~20 years ago in the rust belt and the midwest).

Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community.

It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue.

It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.

Thanks for that link. Great starting point for me.

Wisconsin runs mostly on coal power plants. It's a terrible place to build data centers.

My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.

I was about to ask where they plan on getting the extra power. They are anti solar and wind, so they will either need to burn coal or import it or both (or change the laws!)

Natural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisc...

[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...

Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.

I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.

Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.

For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres

Not sure if serious because you're converting from football fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-Americans generally don't use.

Acres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and documents will use acres outside of legal documents.

India has has a substantial number of acre users.

Almost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.

This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.

These data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"

No say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see.

Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people.

When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.

Foxconn on steroids

Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building anything.

Hint: Many people think there are no reasonable plans to use these data centers.

Kind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out of them.

I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering.

Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.

They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.

Yeah it’s wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When building a facility requiring large electric or water usage that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get connected with 10 or 20 year contracts.

It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.

Its pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against all technological or industrial advancement. They are just getting back to their roots.

Yes pollution.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-powe...

My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents.

Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)

In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me

You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.

But if electricity prices go up, doesn’t that motivate new generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up, then supply increase, then prices go down.

I'm not an expert but I know that new electric capacity takes a while and often a lot of investment (both in generation but also people forget all the other infrastructure necessary to get it to the right place, new transmission lines especially have been a problem) so both of those factors seem to have kept it high for at least some amount of time and also it's not even guaranteed they will since price increases seem to have been surprisingly sticky across a lot of stuff recently. Also, not to be too glib, but try the "prices will eventually go back down" argument on people who have to make the decision between paying for electricity or food this month and you'll see how well that argument goes over. Financial issues are pretty immediate to the large swaths of American living paycheck-to-paycheck.

In addition to environmental concerns (including power and water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details like this came out around Amazon warehouses. The fact is, the local communities don't reap the benefits from these despite having to shoulder the cost. Once built, they provide few, if any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new products or services are provided.

Data centers absolutely cause pollution.

> And solar is getting really cheap.

Alas...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/wind-s...

I find it strange that when there is a housing crisis, they can't seem to build enough, frequently because of building permit refusals. But when a data centers get secrecy and fast tracked before anyone can oppose them.

Is there evidence of "fast tracking"? I'm imagining permitting a green field data center build is different from densification of an already populated urban place.

> Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company

How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?

Turns out sucking up all the information there is and displaying ads is worth a lot.

That’s still a little mind boggling.

They don’t make anything or directly help somebody else make something.

they provide a platform that can maybe sometimes nudges an individual purchasing decisions in one direction.

They capture around 15% of global ad spending.

$200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a trillion dollars.

because it is all made up

I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in.

I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?

I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.

How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?

One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.

Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.

its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had

So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI?

You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.

If the people don't want it then we should just ignore them, sign a NDA and put it there anyways?

There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.

So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.

This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.

I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.

I wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government disability payments which seems to be the main income source there.

NIMBY for data centers is opportunity for SpaceX. When they saturate the demand for communication, data processing demand will be ramping up with no apparent ceiling. The merger between SpaceX and xAI positions them to benefit both from the AI revolution, and from the resistance to it. It's like a hypothetical 19th century textile company that managed to profit from Luddite riots by using them to help move production to Umpa Loompa.

Is this satire? I can't even tell anymore. If so, bravo.

Yep. That was my first thought when I saw the SpaceX & xAI merger news.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...

Do data centers in space actually make sense? I can’t figure out how that’s possible. But some people seem to believe they do(?)

> Do data centers in space actually make sense?

No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.

this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about.

This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.

I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?

Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.

What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?

Google is hardly betting on it; they are exploring the feasibility of it and are frank about the engineering challenges: > significant engineering challenges remain, such as thermal management, high-bandwidth ground communications, and on-orbit system reliability.[1]

[1] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...

why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and invest enormous amounts of R&D.

You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.

> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers

Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?

As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?

I never said Google wasn't serious; I said they are hardly betting on it relative to their other capital expenditures. Google rightfully describes this as a "moonshot." To date, the only public hardware commitment is two prototype satellites in 2027 for a feasibility study. Compared to the billions pouring into Waymo, DeepMind, and terrestrial data centers, this doesn't yet qualify as an "enormous" financial bet, even if the engineering intent is serious.

i agree with you then. lets agree that the intent is serious.

Everyone were also betting on quantum computing and the hydrogen energy revolution.

My napkin math says that, for a system at around 75°C, you would need about 13,000 square meters of radiators in space to reject 10 MW of heat.

why do you think they are betting on it if it so obvious to you that it won't work?

Just because some CEOs pour billions into fantasy projects it doesn't mean they're viable. Otherwise we all would be in the metaverse wouldn't we?

Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?

No but you're claiming "if they all are investing X amount then these bets obviously must pan out". If you follow that rationale then it means that all bets that these company's make in the same space must all pan out. So if they don't all pan out then the fact that they're all making bets isn't a sound rationale for it being true.

As others have pointed out, investors notoriously have FOMO, so rationale actors (CEOs of big tech) naturally are incentivized to make bets and claims that they are betting on things that the market believes to be true regardless if they are so as to appease shareholders.

No, i don't claim that all bets must pan out - simply that most bets are made intelligently with serious intent.

that's the way i see this bet as well.

your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect - its the musical chairs theory of markets.

> simply that most bets are made intelligently with serious intent.

That is NOT what you said. You said this:

> Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?

In other words: "if these companies are putting all of this money to work then it's obvious it will work"

So, no you didn't simply say "their bets are made intelligently with serious intent". No one is saying these companies aren't serious about it, they are saying there are legitimate physics limitations involved here that are either being ignored or the companies are betting on a novel scientific breakthrough.

> your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect - its the musical chairs theory of markets.

Then you clearly have never worked with investors before.

Here’s our point of disagreement: I think smart people have made a bet in this with serious intent after considering all the pitfalls. You think they are either deliberately ignoring it (so ridiculous) or they are betting on a scientific breakthrough.

It’s too comical to even address the “they are ignoring it part” so I’ll ignore it.

I would agree with you that part of their bet might involve hoping for breakthroughs and the investment analysis probably factored it in.

Lots of earlier investments have banked on breakthroughs like this.

Also your opinion on how markets work is naive and unscientific.

> Also your opinion on how markets work is naive and unscientific.

You sure about that?

https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/21/1/19/157439...

Because it will inflate their stock valuations? It's like with fusion energy or going to Mars etc., constantly X years away and currently economically unfeasible.

why do you think their stock will inflate?

I'm not sure if you're joking, but "AI datacenter in space" is the kind of phrase that attracts investors, that's straight from Musk's playbook for keeping the stock trading at ridiculous P/Es, especially now that he is planning SpaceX IPO.

why does it attract investors if it is so obvious that it will fail?

it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said money into this venture that obviously won't work. why does he waste his time into a venture that obviously won't work? who knows

You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was creating a new political party in the US, how's that going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing people on Mars in 2018? It’s 2026. How is boring company going? etc. I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works, and the physics is simple here: unless you change the physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.

So you have no clue why he's doing it? He's putting money in a thing that will obviously fail.

Either you are way way smarter than him, or he's doing this for some other ulterior motive.

You didn't answer my questions. How is The Boring company going? And in this context, you can also ask: "Is he putting money into something that will obviously fail?"

Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter than him" there nine years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020

Here Bezos, sundar, Jensen all are invested.

On boring: it’s easy to say in hindsight.

You know why I mentioned hydrogen energy earlier? There was a Financial Times article last month titled "Hydrogen dreams meet reality as oil and gas groups abandon projects", which notes that "Almost 60 major low carbon hydrogen projects—including ones backed by BP and ExxonMobil—have been cancelled" because they weren't economically feasible. Space data centers are in the same place today. It's physics. And none of the people you mentioned have invested in this. They may be interested and might research the topic, but that's not the same thing. I've yet to see any plan that explains how they'll replace failed hardware and manage heat while keeping the whole thing economically feasible.

ok so you are smarter than all of them? and if they had put you in charge instead of the phd's, they might have been better off?

You're using an uninteresting appeal to authority argument again.

So let's talk physics. Are you familiar with the radiative heat-balance problem? You can use the Stefan–Boltzmann law to calculate how many radiators you'd need.

Required area: A = P / (eps * sigma * eta * (Tr^4 - Tsink^4))

Where:

A = radiator area [m^2]

P = waste heat to dump [W]

eps = emissivity (0..1)

sigma = 5.670374419e-8 W/m^2/K^4

eta = non ideal factor for view/blockage/etc (0..1)

Tr = radiator temperature [K]

Tsink = effective sink temperature [K] (deep space ~3 K, ~0 for Tr sizing)

Assuming best conditions so deep space, eps~0.9, eta~1:

At Tr=300K: ~413 W/m^2

At Tr=350K: ~766 W/m^2

At Tr=400K: ~1307 W/m^2

So for 10 MW at 350K (basically around 77°C): A ~ 1e7 / 766 ≈ 13,006 m^2 (best case).

And even in the best case scenario it's only 10 MW and we're not counting radiation from the sun or IR from the moon/earth etc. so in real life, it will be even higher.

You can build 10 MW nuclear power plant (microreactor) with the datacenter included on Earth for the same price.

Show me your numbers or lay out a plan for how to make it economically feasible in space.

you are saying you can stop an entire division in google, nvidia, blue origin with this bit of theory?

like all the employees had to do with read this and be like: wow i never saw it that way.

Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech. Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any money.

Investors, both commercial and individual, often have more money than sense.

Do you think investors as a large group make enormous amounts of money on average?

I didn't say they make it. They have it, like an older person who grew their portfolio over time. They are an example of someone who invests in AI without knowing anything about what it is.

its incorrect - investors and wall street in general _makes_ money on average.

Well it made you invest in them.

Yes because as I said I believe it will work out, so does Google, SpaceX, Blue Origin.

Kodak made a crypto coin. Where did that end up?

> Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?

Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it.

The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.

Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: - demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York by the end of 2017 - "autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year" - “thousands” of Optimus humanoid robots working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025." - Tesla semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017, and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later they have received half of them.)

I have put as much money as I believe in it (risk adjusted). And same goes for Google, Spacex, Blue Origin and other companies.

This trope

> It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.

Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like. Whether you like him as a person or not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason enough to believe him now.

>Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like

Are you trolling?

Almost everyone in the industry thinks this way.

SpaceX and Starlink are privately held.

The demand for allocation in any of SpaceX private funding raises is practically unlimited. It’s just not something you can put your money in.

The thing about Elon is that he's got more than enough credibility with betting on big crazy ideas that he's one of a few people that you have to take seriously.

Tesla from LA to NY - https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-itself-...

Thousand of Optimus Robots...just announced closing a factory to have them focus on robot production - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla-ending-model-s-x-produ...

SpaceX rewriting the entire economic formula for space launches, accounting for almost 90% of all launches globally last year, becoming a critical piece of the Department of Defense while also launching Starlink globally.

Neuralink let's people control computers with their brain, even playing video games. They're working on an implant to cure blindness right now.

https://neuralink.com/trials/visual-prosthesis/

I get that the man is politically unpopular in some circles, but it's really difficult to bet against him at this point. So far, the biggest criticism has been that it took a little longer than he initially said to deliver...but he did deliver.

Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.

I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the other issue that information processing is an inherently dissipative process because entropy etc.)

How would electrical resistance drop in space? If you're thinking "because it's cold" that's actually the biggest issue. The vacuum means you can't dispose of heat easily, so you need giant radiators, which are expensive, heavy, etc.

there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth.

the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.

and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.

It sounds like you're describing Google's proposal, which I believe is at least feasible (though likely uneconomic) unlike, say, Starcloud's. I don't think you are correct about the orbit, though; Google's proposal lists the satellites at 650 km, which would give them approximately 20 years in orbit without boosts. They list estimated life at 5 years given radiation concerns, so they almost certainly would purposely deorbit them earlier.

I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no. However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based internet system would be both expensive and impractical for bandwidth and latency.

Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to their approach to optimize launch costs.

It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental advancement that would make this less impractical than it sounds. I'm still really skeptical.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a container ship, convert it to a data center and connect it to a bunch of floating panels?

Most systems use fresh water for cooling. Salt water can corrode pipes and deposit sediment, but maybe there's a way to use ocean water efficiently.

They also need to be powered and connected to a network, but that seems like an easier problem.

the internal loop can be fresh water which heat exchanges with the ocean water

I wouldn’t overthink the SpaceX / xAI thing. Seems to me it’s a pure financing play to blend two companies owned by the same guy that might look meh on their own to the market but have a compelling narrative about “future growth” together.

All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.

what about Google? It's always the same tired thought ending cliches - companies with "bad" people do obviously "bad" thing to convince idiotic shareholders and prop up the bubble.

i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.

Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.

What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?

Space doesn't seem like a good place to build datacenters at all. Cooling is going to be an enormous issue, how do you disperse of heat in a vaccuum? Radiators are very ineffective for cooling.

Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.

Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation convertible to electricity should enable that.

Both parts are documented about ISS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...

Space is indeed very cold, but it does not cool you off very quickly. The lack of particles means it's harder to get heat away from yourself. Essentially all of the energy produced via solar panels would be converted to heat by the computers.

It's cold in a sense that is not very relevant. Your tumbler has a vaccuum layer because vaccuum does not transport or absorb any heat. you need those atoms to carry away heat.

> Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.

That absence of particles also means it is a nearly perfect insulator, with almost no heat transferred from the station to space by contact with space. No convection either.

That leaves cooling by thermal radiation, which is not a very good method.

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