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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

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Italian farmers pay effectively 0% taxes on land and the areas are quite poor. Data centers on the other hand pay lots of taxes.

Why would they ban productive uses of land?

Obviously because they care more about things than just making money.

> Obviously because they care more about things than just making money.

why should someone be banned from selling their land if they want?

The concept of land ownership is somewhat flawed (how can you "own" something that existed before you and will outlast you) and there's a finite amount of land available for various purposes, so for the benefit of humanity/civilisation it can make sense to ensure that land with certain properties is kept for the purpose of growing food or for hosting particular ecosystems (e.g. rivers).

Even if it's not agricultural land, there can be strategically important pieces of land that a country will insist cannot be sold to organisations that are opposed to the values of that country. However, in those cases, it might make more sense for the state to make compulsory purchases of that land.

Welcome to zoning?

That's very black and white.

They don't pay "lots" of taxes. They pay taxes for the two engineers and 8 janitors working there.

I can't say I'm overly familiar with Italy's tax regime (besides googling and confirming they effectively don't tax agricultural land) but the large Meta data center is paying >$22 million in taxes to a county with ~2,000 people[1]. In Northern Virginia they re collecting over a billion dollars a year in taxes from data centers [2]. Allegedly that reduces household tax burden by ~$6k per year.

I have no relation to the data center industry at all, it is just weird to see the discourse around it be so divorced from reality. There is a commenter below me saying that land ownership is illegitimate in the first place in order to justify banning data centers.

Is your understanding that the only tax burden on data centers is via income to local employees?

[1]. https://www.shreveportbossieradvocate.com/business/meta-data... [2]. https://progresschamber.org/insights/data-centers-cut-proper...

This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.

Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.

Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.

Please let's not fool ourselves that AI businesses don't care about costs because they have a lot of money. They burn a lot of money, yes, but they are looking for profitability and they won't achieve it with a 200% tax on top of large energy bills and hardware expenses.

The timing can make a big difference though, as they might be happy to burn through money to get better adoption, especially if that pumps up their stock price. Also, if the executive making the decision is looking to jump ship, then they might not care about the long term impact.

I don't think they are happy about burning through money, especially if they can just build their data center somewhere else and avoid the 200% tax. The moment of reckoning is happening in real time, all paid plans for AI models are heavily subsidised and heavy users are absolutely ruining their finances. Do you think they would want to build their data center specifically in a 200% data center tax area to make their financial situation even worse? I don't think so.

at some point the additional tax revenue outweighs the downsides

I disagree as you can't eat or drink tax revenue.

Datacenters don't meaningfully impact food production.

This is just an aesthetic objection, nothing more.

you can eat food and drink water, though. use the tax revenue to directly support food and water via investing it in agriculture, food imports, water sanitation, etc.

Tax revenue doesn't outweigh clean water. Without clean water, we die.

the water thing is exaggerated when it comes to data centers.

but playing along with it: you just raise the % tax increase until it covers the cost of importing/cleaning the water or whatever other negative externality the data center causes.

the concept is similar to "fuck you" pricing of construction contracts. you place a bid that is super high (i.e. the 200% tax), and you're happy either way. if you land the job (data center is built), you make insane profits (tax) to be used elsewhere (cleaning water, green initiatives, or whatever). if you don't land the job (data center not built), that is great too, you didn't really want it anyways.

one thing is absolutely certain, though: humans will never build so many data centers that we run out of water. water scarcity will be from other causes.

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