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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

The DCs are going up across middle income countries: industrial zones in South East Asia, India and Morocco, and also UAE/Saudi.

Anger towards DCs are pertinent from a politics-in-rich-country angle, but it has no relevance on the overall trajectory of where we are heading.

If DCs get banned in the US, there are still many middle income countries who want them in their special industrial zones, due to the FDI and employment opportunities they bring, and these countries provide generous tax breaks to hyper scalers to compete for their business.

Malaysia and India are recent examples of this policymaking. The new US funded DC zone in Philippines is another example.

There's an interesting geopolitics (emphases on "geo") angle to this if these critical assets are going to increasingly be built overseas.

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Always with the threats. "You better roll over and take it, because those other countries are"

How about the middle ground of ok, you can build the datacenter, but it's owned by the locality. They can lease it back to the builder for the privilege of being able to operate on their ground. And the lease is steep. No more second homes on the cape, or private italian schools for the kids.

A random people on hn, presumably not a data center manager, is not "making a threat" by talking about potential second order effects of data center policy.

No despicable data center apologist has ever suggested that communities shouldn't negotiate the best deal they can get to compensate for the incurred costs and externalities.

Why do you feel justified defining what terms a community can agree to when considering hosting a data center? Do you not believe the democratic right for them to self-govern.

> employment opportunities

the 5-7 people they employ during normal operation. High skilled engineers get flown in for setup and major changes/operations.

They add little local economic value.

Why does Malaysia give tax breaks to data centers?

Definitely not because of long-term employment, even very large DCs only employ about a hundred staff on-site.

A hundred is a lot bigger than five

Still very few for deserving a tax break based on potential employment opportunities. A DC simply doesn't help the local economy, it's very often a net-negative: it's very resource-intensive while not generating much in terms of economical activity for where it sits at.

In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.

They consume land? Where does the land go?

They can be taxed. There should be a point where the price is right for the community hosting.

The vast majority of tax revenue is calculated where the headquarters are located, not where the datacenter is located.

I've seen multiple stories already talking about how these installations are almost universally net-negative for the locales they're built in.

If this is the case why would local officials permit them?

Why do members of congress end up with more wealth than their salary could justify?

So who is bribing Malaysian officials to give tax breaks to foreign DCs? Be specific.

Obviously nobody is incentivized to do that. Nothing to see here.

I would say a combination of already being rich, being old, and insider trading. Congress can't actually take personal funds from lobbyists legally.

Maybe if someone is in Congress, they can skirt the law around lobbyist gifts due to your position of power, but 1. it doesn't sound very plausible that someone becomes a multimillionaire by squirreling away illegal gifts or campaign funds and 2. to become I doubt small town city councils making these decisions are in a similar place. Most of reality is boring and not like the movies.

They provide very few employment opportunities.

Yeah, the only point where DCs employ a lot of people are during the construction period. Maybe good if you have a ton of excess electricity and you need to prop up your local construction industry for the next five years.

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