Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
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This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.
It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.
Someone buys the plot 30yr later. They can't clear it and farm it without spending a quarter mil on environmental permitting because the government sees it as a pre-existing forest and the drainage ditch farmer Johnson's dad dug back in 1988 is now a stream (i.e. protected wetland) so they want the new owner to get the same permits that someone bulldozing a swamp for a strip mall would.
You see comparable fact patterns on every axis of regulation.
The government will still screw you out of hundreds of thousands (mostly in the form of "pay these other people four figures for study X and plan Y" type requirements) to even get to that point though
But a seller would probably prefer to sell without contingency, so what terms are available depends on market conditions.
Title insurance for residential real estate may sometimes cover properties that are unbuildable due to unsatisfiable permit requirements.
All told, it's easier as a buyer if you purchase an existing structure that was built under permits and is currently in use under appropriate occupancy permits.
The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to take that long it but a real strain on the business.
So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.
Of course, the businesses should be only one part of the expertise that goes into writing the laws; other experts MUST be involved, or it will indeed be a fox and henhouse situation where the fox designs the legal locks so they can always be opened by foxes...
That can be an example of model legislation but, broadly, model legislation is created by an organization for use as an example for multiple different legislatures (usually states). Everyone from think tanks, busineses, the EFF, the ACLU and PETA draft model legislation.
Often the choices are —
1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is your example. But problematically all permitting applications are typically public record, so when you fail, the land can’t be sold on to someone else as if that didn’t happen, any sophisticated buyer will know the exact issues the city/county had with your usage. Land often transacts onward at firesale prices under these circumstances.
2. $/acre for land is bid upon at a substantial premium reflecting the future value as a datacenter, it remains under contract for potentially years pending outcome of approvals, then it transacts. Permitting being denied usually results in either no money changing hands or a small termination fee reflecting the carrying cost of the land during that period. If permitting works out the seller of land walks away very happy as the $/acre was extremely lucrative.
For simple businesses like a retail store in a location that has other retail it’s not too risky to bet that you’ll be approved, too.
For businesses with unique needs or that happen to be in the public crosshairs, you’re putting a lot at risk in the process.
The process favors big companies and developers who have established relationships and “connections” with the planning boards.
The situation is even wilder in some other countries, both more and less corrupt than the average US municipality. In some places you’re not getting a permit at all without a sizable bribe, or having an in with the planning board.
In my city one of the aspiring developers tried to run an expensive political campaign to get a family member into an office that could have helped with their approvals. People caught on and didn’t like it one iota.
Architecture, civil engineering, and other design and permitting fees can easily be 7–10% of the overall cost of smaller projects. Even in large projects they’re often 4-5% or more, and the number of billable hours for complex impervious surface and stormwater management adds up fast, as do engineering stamped plans for structural and other factors.
Most cost here is also incurred fairly early before you have any vertical construction done — Phase 2 in a program after land acquisition. So you feel like you’re spending a ton on paperwork and you can’t see anything yet.
You CAN spend a bit of money even before land acquisition on quick feasibility studies but in U.S. terms for something like a residential, small commercial or light industrial project every parcel you go “I like that, can it work?” you are dropping $15-50k during a 45-120 feasibility period. Should it 100% not work out you are NOT getting reimbursed that by the selling party. You’re out the money. Even within 90 days you may find some uncertainties like SEPA approval won’t close before you have to say deal or no deal on the parcel acquisition. This is quite unlike massive companies doing business where the land may not change hands until essentially every approval is locked in (but should it not work out the buyer may be out millions in engineering fees paid to try and make it work).
Borrowing to buy land and then borrowing more to build something is also treated very differently by most lenders. It carries tremendous uncertainty versus you buying a preexisting lot and structures which they know how to value. That’s fundamentally something that causes unwillingness to lend, or changes the rates and down payment or security terms. In contrast with a conforming mortgage for a SFR (single family residence) at 6%, borrowing to build (a construction loan) can be 10-14% APR, often secured via personal guarantee and other assets you possess, and then you have to convert to a personal or commercial mortgage after you complete building what you wanted.
Borrowing to buy the land is even more complicated again — you very often must be able to pay cash for land, and then just borrow to do the construction. Borrowing for both especially with limited assets to secure against will always be a polite “Sorry; we can’t help.”
So now, all of it sits abandoned, no construction started, and now its not even worth building as they claim "down town is dead".
This is likely the fate of that land, a write off until its so valuable they can sell it to someone else.
Storage though, yeah, that makes sense.
I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.
I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.
It'd be one thing if the requirements were merely onerous, but the discretionary nature adds corruption greatly favoring incumbents, the deep pocketed, and those willing to disregard the rules (start-ups with low capital requirements).
Never mind the timeline of these processes. Permitting can take 18-24 months, as can items like basic utility upgrades (adding 480V service, for instance, to an existing building can be an 18 month ~quarter million dollar endeavor.)
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces.
Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation.
Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area.
If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same.
The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...
Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0]
The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention.
If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with.
[0]: https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeC...
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
TIL.
400 vaticans
So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?
Storage? Even that is now ultra-compact.
Figure on ~10 million square feet of conditioned DC space per year, approximately 5-10GW of additional power consumption to power those 250k cabinets (depending on the exact mixture of what’s in the racks — Compute, Storage, Network, Accelerators), and that’s just for one hyperscaler.
There are at least 5-7 companies in the hyperscaler weight class although likely none individually meaningfully larger than AWS, they’re the 800lb bear and everyone else is in the 500-750lb range.
It’s a lot. Datacenters also take long enough to build that a hyperscaler is pouring concrete today for shells they expect to serve real workloads in 2029 - 2031. What you’re seeing come online today in response to customer demand really started being built in 2021 - 2023.
Datacenters aren’t built next to Nordstrom. Theres just no reason to spend on engineering and construction that increases density like underground parking.
So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.
Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…
All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.
James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —
https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...
Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
This is a false dichotomy, though. That region has enough land that you could do both. There just isn't much demand for manufacturing in the Upper Midwest right now.
They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.
There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.
There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.
Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.
You've got these people going on TV and doing interviews saying that this new technology will be capable of replacing huge amounts of jobs.
The people that say that most jobs will be eliminated by AI are making direct threats of violence against the families of millions of people. Telling someone that they will no longer have any way of feeding their children is telling them that you're going to kill their family.
I'm not saying this to convince you that that's true. You could make some counter-arguments to that, and I'm sure people will come along and do that. The point is to understand it that that's how it's perceived by the people hearing it.
And then to add insult to injury, they want to come do it in your town.
They want to pitch a giant "development" project. But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you've already told them that the reason we need so many more data centers all of a sudden is specifically so that we can eliminate whatever jobs are left that we didn't get a chance to eliminate over the last several decades when we exported most of the jobs we could to different countries.
By the way we're the same assholes who said "trust us" last time, and pitched the idea that it would lead to a prosperous future for everyone. Instead you made money off sending the jobs to china, capturing all excess value with software, and addicting our children to opioids.
And your next exciting offer for us is a giant windowless building that will take up open land, nature, and yes, water and electricity, and employ almost nobody.
People don't feel like they control a whole lot, but they do have some ability to complain about this thing happening where they live.
The actions of people opposing these data centers are completely rational. If I'm trying to make one point, that's it.
The actually interesting part of this back and forth on HN is that Silicon Valley (aka "tech") culture has grown so fundamentally rotten at its core that not only do people not have values that place humans first, they can't even recognize when other people do.
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Nonetheless I can see that fixating on this instead of my obviously correct point which is that people absolutely hate data centers and the sociopathic tech billionaires behind them for rational reasons is a good dodge.
Hardly unexpected when I am posting on the promotional discussion board of a private equity firm responsible for launching many of these sociopaths into society.
My later comment about water usage is both unneeded for that point to stand and trivially proven true.
So yes, one of the two key players here is the heavily financed tech sector.
Starting to think these disingenuous replies are in fact the point here.
Since none of of these conversations on HN make much difference anyways, my only hope is that one person, somewhere, who is a part of the "tech community" that usually gathers here (and of which I am a longtime member) becomes newly aware that people fucking hate us now for excellent and extremely well-supported reasons and thinks a little about how that happened and how they might change it.
It's fine that you think the discussion is unproductive; I agree, our premises are too far apart to get anywhere. But you'd get further with, well, everybody that doesn't already agree with you if you'd stop accusing anybody who doesn't agree with you of being "disingenuous".
And on a personal level, I hope you reconsider your life decisions a little and realize the importance of a culture where people can feed their families and lead healthy productive lives of dignity, regardless of who their parents are or how gifted they happen to be intellectually.
What I actually said is perhaps you should think about the people who end up worse off under the system you advocate for.
Your call of course but this is definitely not violence.
Violence is what happens when attempting to work through civic institutions and discourse has failed so many times that people no longer try this approach.
Right. That’s something I’ve found that those of us in the modern ruling class tend to have in common.
Perhaps we should be. It’s the most common outcome of this degree of inequality and disenfranchisement.
Or maybe we’ll get lucky and this will be history’s one exception to the rule.
This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.
Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.
The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.
Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.
Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.
It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.
If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unempl...
The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
They just say it. They go on TV and do interviews and say it out loud.
So then everyone who has any ability to stop it in any possible way tries to do that.
What exactly the fuck do you think they're going to do?
And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Lumping together anti-data-center sentiment with anti-development sentiment in general is bullshit. Yes, there are certainly impossible to negotiate with NIMBYs who don't like apartment buildings because they cast shadows on a sidewalk corner or something. That has nothing to do with this.
The politics of data centers are completely different. If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.
It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.
I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.
> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.
AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.
I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.
These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.
> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?
Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.
> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.
Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.
My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.
It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.
I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor."
This is another way of me countering your main point here.
It's not the same people you've seen in previous arguments.
It's those people plus almost all of the other people because overwhelming 70%+ majorities don't want these things.
So we know that. That's the given here, assuming you think there's at least some validity to Gallup and polling.
The question then becomes why? My rants are intended to illustrate why. They sound like "rants" because people are extremely fucking angry about how things are going, so accurately restating their opinions also sounds angry.
The culture has changed. People do not fucking trust tech companies and their leadership at all for extremely valid reasons. Talk about wind farms all you want. I can go ahead and talk about the Yankees. The conversation at hand is about data centers, and data centers are their own issue.
When people like you come along and say it's "free money" nobody fucking believes you because there is a rich and long history of that kind of bullshit already.
There's a point of view here that they oppose data centers out of ignorance. My countervailing point is that their distrust is almost certainly rational, considered, and correct.
Distrust is the only sane response to recent events.
I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:
> Data centers absolutely are loud
Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.
> They consume large quantities of water
I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.
Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.
> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else
This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.
(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward
“Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land.
Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback
The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties.
47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News
Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin.
The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.”
TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement:
“Nothing official has been submitted to the Village regarding their pending application, and have no comment until such time.”
Resident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news. PRESCOTT BALCH TMJ4 Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area.
"We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said.
Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article.
"I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated. Nancy Pierce TMJ4 News Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia.
Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia.
As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process.
"I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community."
"There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."
If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.
What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?
>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible
Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.
Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.
And no I do not blame small website owners they just have to live with this mess same as everyone else.
I think this is a poor analogy, unnecessarily politicizing the topic.
It might be a good analogy the other way around, if hackers DDOSed the website as revenge for partial IP-based blocking, in order to apply pressure to the website operator to remove IP-based blocking. But that wasn't the topic.
I work around this by using my phone connection with phone chrome.
For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.
As a small website owner, I can use Cloudflare or I can wait for this imagined tech.
Ofc it's your choice.
For some reason there are many small sites I have no problem visiting and then there are those CF users which may or may not work at any given moment, forcing me to ignore them.
Well, good luck. You are cutting yourself from the internet, not cutting me off.
Are we getting that before or after personal jet packs, flying cars, and my tacos delivered via tacocopters?
I'll protect my sites with Cloudflare until then, thanks.
> If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence
DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.
Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.
> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
How do you not even see the irony of this?
I'm not exaggerating, I'm just playing what if. That's a game where you think of random things that could go wrong, and then deciding if it is worth the expense. Just because maybe you can't think of things of varying plausibility does not make me exaggerating. We already see ransomware working from the hacker's perspective. There's no reason to think that greed will not come into play. If I can think of it, there's no reason to think that hackers are not also considering various ways to expand on ransomware as a service
>> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
> How do you not even see the irony of this?
How do you not? If every hacking group can come along and extort any site they choose to pay them a protection fee, there's no way websites will accept any of this. Compare that to paying a single legit service protecting against all of those hacking groups. Can't imagine why people would be willing to do that.
You can be absolutely destroyed if your hosting provider later hits you as a Website Owner with an excess traffic bill.
This is something that would be perfect for cloudflare to host and sell as a service - static web pages via their CDN network.
I do not work in web development, so im sure there are plenty of details im ignorant of, but the TLDR of "how to fight accidental DDOS because of AI tooling " is make it easier for them to get the content they want.
If DDOS is really the problem we want to solve then it would be awesome if one can do it without looking into the packet. SSL terminating at some centralized third party provider is way too much power.
Someone said it's like protecting yourself from stabbings by banning kitchen knives, but it's more like protecting yourself from stabbings by wearing thick rubber armor at all times, that also happens to be filled with spy cameras somebody else owns. It's a bit of an overreaction to a very rare threat, don't you think?
I hit this a lot with Firefox VPN and it's ridiculous
Larger hosting providers may have enough bandwidth to accept and drop most inbound volumetric DDoS. Smaller providers often contract with a DDoS mitigation service; during an attack the mitigation service BGP announces the attacked range, filters out problematic traffic and forwards the rest.
It's been at least 7 years since I ran servers that routinely saw DDoS... at that time, we didn't tend to attract attacks anywhere near 10Gbps, so having 10G connections for severs likely to be targetted did most of the work. I'm sure it's worse now, so 10G might not cover easy attacks but 100G servers aren't hard to find. Attacks do get larger than 100G, but most sites won't be hit with a large attack.
For a small site, taking an outage during a DDoS is often an acceptable alternative too.
Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.
This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.
These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.
But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.
How good a school is - which we can expand into more detailed definitions like "how much do children learn there?", "how much does any individual kid like or hate it?", "is this a good use of a child's time?" - is dominated by what the other kids they are in a shared social setting are like, and not by how expensive the facilities are or how well the teachers are paid.
But, companies put a lot of capital equipment in them, and capital equipment accrues property tax, so there should be taxes paid from that.
[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
Absolutely 100% force them to make a genuine case for them and to sign contracts demanding they live up to their obligations. Otherwise, it's more evidence why billionaires need to write and sign some reality checks on their dragon piles.
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...
I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.
If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.
I believe in many areas this is the kind of infrastructure investment that regulated utilities can easily pass onto existing rate payers, which is where the problem/narrative comes from in the first place. So your theory doesn't match the actual results people are complaining about.
Same thing when datacenters take power generation into their own hands and build new gas turbines rather than solar/batteries or paying to expedite grid construction. And I'm willing to believe these problems happen in a minority of cases, but the problem is that they seemingly do happen and existing residents are left without recourse.
This is talking about the capital assets themselves, which are of course separate from regular maintenance like tree trimming.
About the only thing I can think of is something like a bulk of the grid infrastructure was built out 30/40/50/whatever years ago, and is now all reaching its expected lifetime all at once, and perhaps some types of equipment are strictly retired at the end of their lifespan lest they fail catastrophically.
Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?
It is all about how you plan, build etc how good you are.
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
I've gotten by on McDonald's wifi
Meetings are usually under 10Mbps of downstream and 2Mbps upstream.
It’s simply false you need 1Gbps of “low latency” internet to work from home effectively unless your job is something like content production and working with huge files.
Producing for OnlyFans? Benefit from 1G to send raw to your editor.
Doing most other forms of work? Doesn’t require remotely close to this amount of bandwidth.
I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year.
Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it).
Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here.
> Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.
We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so.
So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.
What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’m always a bit baffled by someone saying “Please don’t invest $5B and create 100s of jobs and taxable improvements in my back yard”.
This is a common argument: wanting 1000s of jobs during construction and 1000s of jobs after construction, but this isn’t a car manufacturing plant. That’s a “we want our cake and we want to eat it too” argument — not saying it’s your argument just that this comes up frequently.
So you won’t see the building cease being useful for about 20 years. You’re getting usually two full cycles of “the servers inside” before a renovation program (or potentially asset/building disposal to another party, or demolition, depending what changes in those 20 years really).
What’s often happening around these tax agreements is they are a mixture of incentive and an offset of prepaid improvement costs to the city/county for developing mains water, sewer, roads, schools, fire and police, and other infrastructure, sufficient to support the 100s of families who may move here to take the post-commissioning jobs, etc.
Often money out the door for the hyperscaler is about the same over 20 years, it’s just some number of $M’s is paid upfront as an “Contribution to Improvements”. That’s actually good for the municipality involved, too.
Municipalities typically know or are told these aren’t tax rebate for 10 years and then it’s getting bulldozed. They’re sophisticated enough and well advised to understand this is a 20+ year investment in their town.
the tax rebates can extend for decades
> these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well
these datacenters haven't been around long enough to know that; these are _not_ your grandma's datacenters -- they are much more resource-hungry since they do substantially more processing
Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.
You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.