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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local.

It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.

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The reason these data centers are getting built in place people don’t want them is because the towns are broke.

The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.

The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.

https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI

Bullshit. The proposed data center in Utah is projected to use more electricity that what the entire state already uses, on an area larger than Manhattan.

The entire state of Utah is not broke. Box Elder County is largely a rural community but it is also not broke.

I'm not here to fight about one mega-data center where they are circumventing local control. I'm talking about the dozens and dozens of data centers being proposed and accepted by city councils all over the United States: https://www.datacentermap.com/

There will be some obvious bad deals. I think you're wrong to assume that the county is not broke from a municipal finance perspective. Nibley, Utah residents had their town evaluate by Strong Towns, they were in a fairly tough financial position until about 2015. The idea that you have residents that are even doing these reports mean that you have an electorate that actually cares at all.

The proposed Box Elder County data center would double the county's tax revenue, even with the tax breaks. There's a clear incentive for the county to approve it.

How is this different than a cornfield? A data center is probably a better neighbor because it doesn't kick up dirt, pesticides, and fertilizer into the air.

Water consumption and localized atmospheric heating have been cited elsewhere as drawbacks. There have been some articles citing noise/vibration pollution (subsonic?) but I'm not completely convinced on that front. Personally, I would add electric grid load to the list.

In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.

Farming consumes more water than datacenters. Infrasound is pseudoscience. The biggest issue imo is that they use a ton of electricity and this country has forgotten how to expand electricity supply so prices go up. The solution to that is to create more electricity though, not ban datacenters

Make the companies constructing a DC pay a bond or whatever for the new power plant, and don't give them tax subsidies. Easy enough?

The companies building data centers have made it clear they're willing to pay to build out the grid. The problem isn't money, it's bureaucracy.

> Farming consumes more water than datacenters.

But you don't see center-pivot or linear-movement farmland built up in areas with high population density, nor do you see them using the municipal, potable water supply for irrigation. That is where datacenters are being built and what datacenters are doing, however, and it is why datacenters are blamed for the exacerbation of municipal water systems in these communities. Groundwater, surface water, harvested rainwater, and reclaimed wastewater are the major sources used by farms. Dasani is the major source of water for datacenters, and it makes a massive difference on the water use math.

Generally people enjoy being around them, looking at them, and eating what they produce.

How does HN feel about ai written blogs? Who wants to go stand next to a 30' warehouse?

Most corn is not for eating.

Okay - people like eating popcorn, beef, and driving too.

There's plenty of room for that, all the planned datacenters that will never be finished or started, and enough solar panels to power it in a small fraction of the space used for ethanol corn.

That's definitely a point but doesn't address mine. People like corn, people don't like AI.

There's a lot of ways a datacenter in your backyard might be less desirable than a corn-field.

Most data center cooling works by evaporation. Hot air or hot water from the servers passes through cooling towers, and water is deliberately evaporated into the atmosphere to carry heat away. That water vapor rises, disperses, and eventually falls as precipitation, but not locally, and not on any useful timescale for the watershed it was drawn from. So the water still exists, but it's been removed from the local hydrological system

Then, there's the ecological angle. Even when companies claim green credentials, locals often scrutinize the actual power mix feeding the facility. If the regional grid is coal or gas-heavy, a data center's carbon footprint can be substantial. There are also concerns about diesel backup generators, potential groundwater contamination, and heat discharge.

Then there's an increased power bills for locals situation, although this one is not as clear and is often disputed. The argument typically goes something like this: utilities operate on cost-recovery models. If a massive new load comes onto the grid and requires infrastructure upgrades like new substations, transmission lines, grid hardening. Those capital costs get socialized across all ratepayers. The data center pays for its energy consumption, but not necessarily for the full cost of the infrastructure built to serve it. That gap gets spread to everyone else's bills.

Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.

But the farms! is the new but her emails!

Even unprofitable farms can produce edible food. A datacenter is a machine that uses electricity to make heat and no other physical prouducts. That's a tough justification to make to people who live near one.

I really dont get this. The US is nowhere close to facing a food shortage. If all the desert farms in the west closed beef and a few vegetables would get a tiny bit more expensive. People act like if we didnt do destructive desert farming we'd have to implement rationing.

Food prices rising has been a political hot topic for the last few years. Voters would have your head for any obvious action that made beef get more expensive, especially NIMBY groups and current ranchers.

How many existing data centers do you think you rely on each day? Almonds do not realistically improve my life in nearly the way the internet does, but also who am I to say whether you should be allowed to farm almonds or build a datacenter?

Let them eat tokens.

> As long as they provide their own power

Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.

The mega-scale ones almost all have power as part of the ramp-up process. They are also a massive tax benefit.

Looking at the controversial Stratos data center in Box Elder County:

Box Elder County baseline (before Stratos): 2026 General Fund revenue: $36.1M 2026 General Fund tax revenue: $21.1M 2026 Municipal Service Fund: $18.8M

Stratos (Phase 1): Power: 3 GW Revenue expected: $30M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 142%

Stratos (Full Buildout): Power: ~9 GW Revenue expected: $108M/year Revenue as % of existing county tax rev: 512%

Planned power details: - Box Elder says it will use natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline. - MIDA describes it as dedicated on-site generation designed to limit demand on the existing grid. - The project ramps from ~3 GW in Phase 1 to ~9 GW at full buildout.

I'll acknowledge that the MIDA structure is not a normal county tax bill and comes with explicit energy-rate discounts, but given that the county could hit 500%+ of its previous tax revenue, I think that's a very easy deal for the county to make.

Data sourced from: https://www.midaut.org/stratos

I drove around the Stargate datacenter construction site in Abilene TX late April. They have maybe 5 or 6 of these large gas fired plants being built near the power substation. I'm not 100% sure what they are but i've seen the same things out in Midland/Odessa for power generation. I'm assuming they'll be generating electricity.

/the scale of that site is like nothing i've ever seen. 100s of those giant cooling units lined up and enough piping that my wife said it reminder her of the refineries on the TX coast.

Well the data centers around me certainly don't provide their own power and water, so your point seems moot

First of all I didn't say that we should ban datacenters. The point is that they should benefit the locals one way or another. Requiring them to invest in energy and other infra is a good first step.

Like producing more tax revenue for a county than the rest of the county combined? That payoff allows for insane levels of infrastructure improvement at literally no cost to locals.

> As long as they provide their own power

How is running local gas turbines more efficient than relying on centralised power generation?

Even the transport costs of getting kerosene to them is considerable.

In the case of the Stratos / Box Elder County mega-datacenter, they are planning to use gas turbines to run off of the nearby Ruby Pipeline. It's a pretty tidy solution, if you ask me.

I’m sorry but I’d like specifics - there are too many environmentalists hand-waving.

This is a well established playbook - it was used with nuclear. It’s being used with oil transport.

It’s literally the same script.

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