There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess
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?