Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps | Hacker News Reader

Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps

techcrunch.com

94 pointsmonkeydust60 comments

View from across the globe:

> Owner of ICE detention facility [...]

Oh, right, of course these things are privately owned..!

The next time any EU politician visits the US they should bring up human rights, like we expect(ed) them to do when they visit China.

Also election integrity. It’s past the point where the US needs international observers for its elections.

As member of OSCE, they have observers although it’s fairly light.

https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/elections/usa/580111

Last time our (Finland) president visited US he was playing golf and shaking hands. Supposedly signed some nice deals...

I am confused, who in the Finnish government wrote the book that PM of Canada quoted at Davos?

Stubb is a realist. He says the rules based world order is gone. We have to hurry and learn how to deal with dictators, because the US is becoming a dictatorship real quick. And that EU countries will have to unite in order to be able to negotiate from a position of strength. It's the only way to survive while staying true to our values (internally).

Would that be the politicians that organized these things?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0014...

I'm not clear on who owns them, but they USED to be owned by private parties and I can't find anything on a purchase ... so ...

Oh and a recent addition: asylum proceedings DO NOT stop the deportation process in Europe anymore. Court proceedings "can proceed", but potentially after actual deportation. Oh and winning the court case gets you the right to stay ... NOT the right to enter. So if governments now just defund immigration courts ... oh they did that long before this new law came into being. Welcome to the new Europe!

Do not worry. I am a European, and I'm 100% positive such details will not stop any Europeans from criticizing everyone else. In fact they're very unlikely to even know about their own laws, especially recent changes.

So our a lot of our prisons. One of the reasons Republicans keep voting to keep marijuana, etc illegal.

I’d like to recommend Kate Beaton’s book Ducks to get a vivid feel for what these “man camps” are like. That book is about camps attached to oil fields in Alberta, but the “AI camps” described here sound very similar.

Did not expect to see that excellent book mentioned here, but I co-sign.

The existence of temporary accommodation for workers in construction projects should not be the issue. It seems like this is a necessary and sensible thing.

The problem is with the quality of that accommodation.

It is also worth noting that there should not be an issue due to the fact that the accommodation provider also supplies accommodation for asylum seekers, because they should be providing acceptable accommodation to those people too.

You can probably add prisons to that list too.

Workers, immigrants, and prisoners all deserve reasonable living conditions. Why people are being housed in a place is irrelevant.

The AI link in this story seems to be simply because there are construction projects involving AI, that seems rather spurious. They wont be the first or last construction projects. Those workers deserve (and probably don't get) the support they need whether they are building a data center, a Casino, or a hospital.

Or you could click the link in the article where they talk about the temporary housing for data centers, including the perks they’re including like “free steaks” and golf.

Oil fields in Alberta are a very different situation than high budget AI data centers in the US.

What makes it very different? It sounds quite similar to me. Each is a lucrative business that requires lots of physical infrastructure to be built out, and therefore needs a large but temporary influx of construction workers and engineers.

How is it not different? These aren’t remote oil fields. The workers could commute to the data centers if they didn’t want to stay at temporary housing.

The article and the one it links to say that the temporary housing is a perk that they’re offering to try to entice workers. It includes gyms, nice food, and activities like golf.

The comparison above to bad oil fields in Canada is arbitrary. Not all temporary housing must be like oil field accommodations in remote Canadian oil fields.

Well, hang on, the brief TechCrunch article we're discussing here links to two different Bloomberg articles. The first is from 2018 about "housing for men working in remote oil fields", the second from 2026 about a data center in Dickens Country, Texas.

I think you're getting overly fixated on "remote Canadian" here. West Texas is plenty remote. Those temporary workers in Dickens County must far outnumber the local population. If people wanted to commute, where are they going to commute from? The closest big city is Dallas, four hours away. (Edit: I tell a lie, Lubbock is closer if that counts.)

It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex, a cool campus where young college hires will want to come and hang out with like-minded peers (and work for long hours as a convenient side-effect). I definitely think it's going to be much more like an oil rig -- people will be paid well, and a decent amount of money will be thrown at entertainment and benefits, but fundamentally it's a place to house hundreds of men who have no reason to be there except that the work has to happen at that specific site.

This article and the linked ones specifically talk about "man camps", not even something like "company towns" where they're maybe trying to establish an actual long-term community.

> It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex

No I’m envisioning what the article is describing combined with my experience with construction projects. You’re the one injecting other stories about Canadian oil fields to the story about something completely different.

I'm confused about how we can be interpreting the same short article so differently. It says: "This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields." So the living conditions in Canadian oil fields seem perfectly relevant.

Flagrant clickbait, flagged. Headline makes it sound like concentration camps with AI wardens, but actually it's just normal temporary housing for construction workers building data centers.

The key distinction here is that the temporary workers would presumably be people who are in federal custody and currently housed in ICE facilities. The temporary housing isn’t the issue.

There’s no suggestion of that in the article.

No, that's what the headline implies, and the body of the article doesn't support at all. It's (currently, and with no indication of intent to change this) two separate branches of their business.

The article does not say this in any way.

It’s just temporary housing for construction workers.

That the headline could be read to suggest such a thing is due to it being clickbait.

  This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil 
  fields.

Its kinda weird to not see temporary workforce housing as some recent phenomena, especially given a recent TV show (I havn't watched it) about a particular railroad construction camp. Work that occurs in remote places requires holistic logistics for the workforce, similar to expeditionary warfare.

  Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the 
  construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States
  [...]
  chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, 
  prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile 
  encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across 
  the Great Plains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)

They tried to fit a lot of ragebait into this article and headline, but the TL;DR appears to be that this company wants to build temporary housing near construction sites so workers don’t have to commute as far if they don’t want to. The only actually criticism of the temporary housing is that it’s “gray” but they note it has access to a gym. Clicking a link to the other article describing them says they have “free steaks” and access to golf.

My cousin works in construction and some times gets job where the money is great but he has to drive 2 hours to the site and 2 hours home or even more. Temporary housing seems like it would be helpful while doing those jobs.

I like steak as much as the next guy but there's no way I'd eat the free "steak" offered to me by someone who owns an ICE facility.

This just in: the facility just got bought by Soylent, LLC. They now offer smoothies as well as free steaks

that sounds like misery. similar uses of nutraloaf have been ruled cruel and unusual punishment in the prison system

I was sarcastically making a combination of Soylent (the meal replacement company), and its inspiration, the fictional Soylent Green [0], which secretly made its food products from processed human bodies.

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

Airlines regularly change the operating base of their flight and cabin crew. Then the crew is either forced to uproot their lives or rent a "crashpad", usually a small apartment stacked full of beds near their airport base.

What does this have to do with construction workers and their temporary housing in this article?

They can’t change the location of a construction site midway through building a structure.

If it's like fracking, the man-camps will become a hub for trafficking of camp-followers.

>AI man camps

Anyone who studied Engineering or Computer science already knows what this is like, lol.

I wonder how long it will take them to link the dots to join their businesses.

These man camp style minimal housing seem like a good solution to the housing crisis, but my guess is some bean counter has made it illegal to use these economical SROs for anything other than despotism.

Over/under on "all of these 'detainees' are sitting around doing nothing" converging with this?

Saint peter dont you call me cause i cant gooooo

I owe my soul to the compary stooooore

Work in a camp run by the people that also run concentration camps for undesirables, what a tempting proposition...

So a company town by any other name?

To me, company town implies that the thing hosts whole families and provides a wider spectrum of infrastructure (roads, stores, entertainment).

I'd classify man camps as worse (even more bleak and dystopian than a company town).

Arbeit macht frei

Feels like one of the solutions to get rid of poor people as a whole?

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011569...

Class warfare is very real.

The oligarchs are the only ones fighting right now. Maybe that should change?

luigi mangioni made an attempt

What kind of dystopian horror is this?

Is it some sort of the camps in the Terminator movies? /s

Obviously they'll force detainees to build data centers in due time.

This is the ultimate dream of Late Stage Capitalism. The vast majority of detainees are non violent, most aren't even 'criminals' aside from overstaying a visa. There's a parallel with California's prison firefighter brigades.

In order to pay the merciful State for your own imprisonment, you shall work on the data centers. Oracle demands it. Sure on paper it's a voluntary program, but Oracle as promised better food in exchange for work .

It's not completely out of the realm of possibility for a detainees to end up manning these detention facilities as well. You'd be surprised at how many skilled workers, many of which actually have status, end up getting detained anyway.

Could be that the temporary housing for construction workers transitions into detainment. Having an AI data canter close to a detainment facility streamlines security. Will the whole facility run on diesel and StarLink? Independent of the surrounding community and conveniently-failure-prone power and Internet?

I'm not sure what part of that classifies it as Late Stage Capitalism.

The Hulks Act was passed in 1776.

The 13th amendment in 1865 explicitly carves it out "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime"

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