They are quite a polluting technology. https://www.staxengineering.com/stax-hub/the-environmental-i...
They also consume significant water causing water scarcity in many places.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.
Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.
Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.
Data centers are essentially an Amazon distribution center that is filled with servers instead of racking with a shitload of electrical and HVAC equipment.
> There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial.
This is typically classified as "heavy industrial"
I use the definitions that the entire construction industry uses. A data center is commercial. A distribution center is commercial. A plastic injection molding company or machine shop is commercial. An oil refinery, grain mill, or power plant is industrial.
Stick a feather in your hat and call it macaroni if you want, it doesn't change my prior point.
Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.
But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.
Then they could pass a law requiring the data centers to pay for these instead of banning them outright, should sort itself out no?
Part of the reason we have big tech getting away with regulatory capture in the US is because they have enough capital to entrench themselves in the economy faster than regulators can react.
They couldn't do that in 20 years of having data centers?
The data centers will ultimately end up being built elsewhere, until those places start pushing back. Without federal protections for the environment or the people all we can do is hope that state, county and city governments step up to make sure that data centers aren't harming them directly.
I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.
Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t
Consumers like breathing (https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution) and drinking clean water (https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/data-center-accused-m...). The noise is loud enough to cause hearing damage, and the smell and light pollution isn't helping consumers either.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/confronting-and-addressin...
What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?
Nearly unlimited cloud storage - AWS / Google / etc. Data centers are the Cloud
Lower property taxes - data centers increase the property tax base, creating tax compression, which shift property tax from consumer –> company. I'm in Texas, so can only be sure that is true here. I have not looked at all other states.
Unlimited cloud storage: Where are consumers getting unlimited cloud storage from? I'm not aware of AWS/Google/others reducing prices/providing unlimited plans.
Software prices are down 73% since 2000: https://x.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/2015463505298878746
> Nearly unlimited cloud storage
$9 / month for 2tb of cloud storage is a pretty sweet deal for anyone. And unfathomable if you travelled back in time before data centers were scaled.
Data centers are a net good for all consumers. Pretty significantly!
Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless.
Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since I don't have the source. FRED via BLS has PPI for software publishers going up in the last ~6 years, but that's not exactly analogous to consumer spend.
When you say 2tb for $9 is unfathomable if you travel back in time, yes obviously if you go back to floppy days it's comical. Cloud storage prices have been the same for a decade now (pre LLM boom).
So software may or may not be cheaper for consumers (hard to say, nobody buys software). And in real dollars cloud storage is cheaper because of inflation. Not sure what the significant gain is.
The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...
My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to have this very conversation). There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.
That's not really the argument.
The problem with the tweet is that the chart kind of sucks, and it isn't immediately obvious. The category cited is "Computer Software and Accessories" which is under "Information Technology, Commodities"
A more interesting category is "Video and Audio services," specifically the live streaming subcategory. People don't buy software anymore, they pay for subscriptions to services.
Here are links to FRED for both top levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEEE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERA . Unfortunately the granularity for the Information Technology index isn't available on FRED from what I could find.
So IT price index is down, frankly to a huge degree. But that includes hardware, so it's hard to draw conclusions about software pricing from that specific chart. But Video/Audio services have seen a fairly sizable increase in index in the last decade.
But that's not really very important. We are talking about price indexes, which do tell us roughly how expensive something is over time, but who cares about the price of basketballs unless that's something I plan on buying as a consumer? The BLS charts give a relative importance which we can use a proxy for "how much a price change would affect the consumer." The relative important of the IT category (linked) is 0.745, but the software subcategory is 0.029. Video/audio and live streaming are 0.595 and 0.185, respectively.
Consumers do not purchase software. Companies don't even bother trying to sell software to consumers. The chart linked is tracking a metric that doesn't matter, because it's not important to consumers.
Going back to the relative importance values from 1999 (https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/cpi-detailed-report-58/a...) personal computers are at 0.106. No other categories. 2009 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05192010.pdf) is 0.248. 2012 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05152012.pdf) software is included with an importance of 0.048. At that point cable/television is at 1.387 (see Video/audio above).
So software prices don't matter. Consumers aren't spending on software. Service prices do matter, and they are getting more expensive.
This feels like a schizo post. Sorry for the complete lack of formatting.
Very interesting, thanks!
But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about
The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...
And Apple has longer-term contracts for delivery of their chips. Apple is more insulated from short term supply shocks because of this, and their giant pile of cash. But even they have discontinued some high-RAM configurations because of the situation.
As you mention, products elsewhere that use RAM have already gone up in price.
If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.
Considering utility rates, I would happily pay more for utilities in the short term to have 30+ years of lower property taxes. The data centers property taxes would go to paying for that buildout, and over time it's a great deal for consumers. That said, I'm in Texas so the property tax issue is more prevalent than it would be in New York.
The prevailing idea is that we're currently in a bubble, especially when it comes to AI hyperscalers, and that the tax revenue will decline when the bubble pops.
Also, not all localities have updated their public utility regs to appropriately assign the costs of infrastructure projects to these new projects. Many, like NoVA have just recently added new utility rate classes specifically for data centers to attempt to do that. In other places, these costs are often are being split among the existing utility customers.
Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.
I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.
I would not benefit from an outright ban so that would be too heavy handed. On the other hand - something has to be done. If anything else it's proof the people do have the power to convince their representatives that these affairs matter and we are paying attention.
I wouldn't be to quick to dismiss this as only political theater.
I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.
It's weird to see "the government is doing its job by responding to its voters" being framed as some nefarious and underhanded move.