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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.

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> The politicization of AI

This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."

Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.

Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.

Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.

Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.

The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities. The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity. The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource. The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.

The retardation has mostly been a case of AI companies fearmongering, lobbying the govt and the govt not reassuming people against job losses. Local governments passing moratoriums is just common sense populism.

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