New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium
reuters.com
reuters.com
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible. The bond market for financing buildouts is looking shaky and even Amazon struggled there in its last go at loaning money to fuel the buildout. That doesn’t bode well for others.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable.
> the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states
What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states would make more sense here. Red states are not impoverished of politics, they just have different politics.
Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.
Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?
I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.
If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies, and tweaking the rules about billing for infrastructure upgrades.
It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if concrete foundations were somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible for addressing it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being legally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
There's no novel problem here that any particular industry would need to find novel solutions for. Just some states ought to tweak their rules about the costs of distribution infrastructure upgrades.
If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.
The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
It won’t change at all, of course. I think maybe you don’t understand the reason for the moratorium. A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. Right now data centers are being built with no consideration for the effect on the surrounding area and, big surprise, people don’t like that.
> Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too.
Eh. The right wing is far more responsive to business wants than it is to populist demands. Right wing politicians do not like banning data centers even if right wing voters do.
Yea, and my bet is none of this is going to happen. There is simply no incentive to make it happen. Why would a government take all these steps? What's the incentive? Much easier to just keep things the way they are, or more likely, simply re-sense the political headwinds in a year.
"The right wing is far more responsive to business wants"
This is all pre-Trump thinking. Trump just randomly banned Fable, tonnes of MAGA politicos running on the "ban datacenter" ticket, all this is simply no longer true.
For example, allowing flock cameras is more "permissive" maybe, but for me, now I have more surveillance to worry about. I am, effectively, "permitted" to do less. So is it permissive really, or just permissive for the "right" party? The party which, lo-and-behold, happens to have more both literal capital than me and political capital?
Politically impoverished is kind of nice, because:
- Red states are "impoverished" politically in that there's very little competition of competing ideas. It's mostly just converged on who's the most christian and most white, and it's become a hivemind. Obviously not all. But I live in Texas. Have you seen political ads in Texas? It's almost 100% just virtue signaling "I'M the most christian!!1"
- Red state fiscal policy often leads to, like, actual poverty. Most red states are very poor, or at least their inhabitants are. There are exceptions, like Texas. But even in Texas: if you drive through Central, South, or West Texas, you will just encounter town after town after town that are borderline abandoned and obviously riddled with abject poverty.
Wall Street is gonna finance these projects and make their cut wherever the projects ultimately are. NY state is simply ensuring that no concrete batch plant in Oneonta accidentally gets rich along the way too,
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
I experience no difference when I run my LLM either here in the US or in the EU or even in China.
So why should these be given any special treatment and tax benefits? They don't really create jobs locally (beyond the initial construction) and they won't bring in any sort of tax revenue beyond what you could get from property taxes. That makes them just a general nuisance. They are much like sewage or landfills, they serve a purpose and are needed but boy would I never want one near me (unless the company actually ends up paying for my community).
It certainly doesn't help that AI CEOs just can't help but to larp as Captain Planet supervillans when giving public talks to investors.
There are a lot of bankrupt companies and fallen nations that believed this. Complacency will hurt you, but only when you realize it too late.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.
Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.
There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.
Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.
And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.
Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.
[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/micron-delay-construct...
These things consume a pretty huge amount of power, more than a steel mill. If they are haphazardly put on a grid without the generation support then the power company has 2 options, brown out or selective blackouts (or risk tripping the whole grid).
It's not silly that an already stressed grid (I'll remind you that NYC just recently asked its citizens to turn the AC to 78 to avoid a brown out) might be pushed over the edge with a new datacenter.
I can't erect, say, an Amazon SWE office in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. How will I get:
- Talent for my office? - Food, shelter, and creature conveniences for my workers? - Culture for my workers? - Entertainment and nightlife for my workers? - and on and on
Turns out DCs need like... none of that. Which is why we just put them anywhere, it seems, and we don't build them in downtown Seattle or Manhattan. But we do certainly put offices in Seattle and Manhattan.
Also, while the DC itself takes some local capital to build, both labor and materials, everything inside the DC is imported. We don't use skilled workers to build GPUs for the DC right, we just buy nvidia.
Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
Why does the local community need their take from that economic activity? What are they even providing? Are they providing land, electricity, and hardware for free to the data center?
The energy usage of these new datacenters is unlike anything we've previously seen. The closest we've seen was crypto mining and people certainly protested that.
A technology that puts X% of people out of work is going to be taxed.
AI companies are already paying tax.
Sue them for pollution/hazard.
So raise the prices? Build more capacity? If you elect politician who can't plan ahead for a simple thing as electricity grid capacity...who's to blame?
Of course data centers aren't just taking up land. They also in many cases produce massive amounts of noise, water and electricity usage, and are visually pretty unappealing to have in your backyard. And there is essentially no upside. Data centers aren't like shopping malls. You might benefit from them existing, but you don't benefit from them existing right next door. If they're not providing at least some tax benefits to the community, I can think of zero reason any community would want them.
You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.
The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.
Source? Maybe it was the case 10 years ago, but today with all the datacenter backlash it's hard to imagine anyone giving sweetheart deals to them.
That's a big reason for the Box Elder data center.
That page has conflicting information. The top text says "Property tax abatement: Limited", which implies tax breaks are limited, but then the bullet point says "Property Tax: Limited", which implies the opposite. Moreover the site doesn't cite any sources so you can't even verify yourself.
Do you think the people hysterically screaming about a data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory?
We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use less energy than traditional factories and less water than golf courses). These are all solved problems.
The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning in secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately. The doomsday religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria given their end times prophecy did not come true. No amount of tax money will provide the same level of meaning as LARPing as an activist fighting in defense of an abstract fragile god (a femininely delicate "mother earth").
Well we better figure out where it ought to come from then. Maybe AI can help us explore the latent space.
So force then to pay more for electricity or water either through direct taxes or by forcing them to subsidize other users.
Am I missing something?
Feels like we should fix those instead of wonton lashing out at any and all economic output.
Second if there is something that causes undesirable side effects (like a data center) you want to tax that activity specifically so the Corp with 8 data centers pays more then the Corp with 1.
Texas is physically larger and 'business frienedly' so suspect they will be getting a lot more.
Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves report" even details a scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply in 2026.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2025/02/12/CapacityDemandan...
Now add data centre demand in a climate where passive-cooling isn't viable and inter-state redundancy is non-existent.
Chips can also be water cooled, and Texas borders an endless supply of water in the Gulf of America.
https://news.ftcpublications.com/core/coastal-cities-test-se...
Its easy to offer hypothetical solutions for a far when details are amis. It's another thing to deal with local politics
I have no particular objection to building datacenters there.
All that said, I think you're being real hand-wave-y here. The climate in Houston is materially different than it is in Dallas. So there's likely a reason these companies have been locating their enormously expensive assets where they have been locating them.
Houston floods. Often.
Houston gets hit by Hurricanes.
Houston is hot and humid with relatively high ground water tables.
Don't even get me started on the power and the durability issues arising from the use of sea water.
There's a lot to work out there. You put what you can afford to lose in Houston, but you don't bet the farm on coastal Texas. You just can't do that if you want resilient infrastructure.
Im not saying it can't be done, but building near the ocean has its own set of drawbacks and costs.
> The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas
Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.
Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?
Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.
Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.
The comment from @piltdownman merely clarified that Texas is for the most part an isolated grid. That if demand matches predictions from our state regulator, Texas needs to continue massively increasing energy supply.
Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.
El Paso is not part of the Texas grid (ERCOT):
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/us-grid-regions
Neither are the panhandle nor the northeastern portion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
Most of Texas is on this grid, not connected to any other states. The total amount of power that can flow between the Texas Interconnect and the rest of the US grid is a small fraction of the Texas grid's demand. That was the point being made by the original commenter.
Anywhere else in the transmission network that has excess generation capacity. If the biggest state benefits from interconnection, why wouldn't the second biggest benefit too?
Daily demand is cyclic, even with no additional capacity added, being connected to grids in other timezones that have different demand peak-times is a net win.
Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.
https://www.spp.org/documents/71831/ercot-spp%20coordination...
No one wants the grid to collapse after all (except you I guess, for whatever reason).
Better for the extra natural gas to power data centers than to "accidentally" leak into the atmosphere .
I'm guessing this is an easy win when you don't live or work near one, and not the one breathing the resulting particulates and nitrogen compounds.
Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?
If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?
One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything. Even on this supposedly 'intellectually-minded' forum the extreme irony flies over the heads of most.
If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.
> One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.
This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.
So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists.
Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I have some bad news for you.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact studies existed caused severe health issues for the surrounding communities, including cancer and death. That's why we have environmental impact studies now.
We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?
Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?
Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?
I'm struggling to understand here.
These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".
> But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."
Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.
> what about Datacenters is uniquely bad
- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts
- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)
- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)
- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife
> Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.
I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.
Yeah and that's how we got a messed up environment.
My town isn't perfect in those terms but it's probably about as good as possible, so yes I would have. Of all the places I've lived, tho, there's certainly lots of thing I would have opposed, given the chance, like all those highways.
The 2021 grid failure was triggered by a winter storm which had 3 effects: pushed up energy demand for heating, kneecapped solar generation, and caused failures in bringing up backup sources online (because operators didn't invest enough in "winterizing" their equipment)
I remember 2011 but I didn't actually have any issues with a power failure it was just extremely icy. These are freak weather events, generally the grid holds up fine. I'm not saying we don't have issues but it is kind o foverblown.
Maybe ask someone who lost power - or lost a loved one - and find out if they are as sanguine about the icy conditions. People died. "It's not a big deal since I wasn't personally affected" isn't a scalable position, but it is a quintessentially Texan attitude.
More likely he is going to make something like Landman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landman_(TV_series)#Renewable_...
story about a salt of the earth datacenter operator who manages the datacenter and people while spreading misinformation about the impact of datacenters on people.
It’s all fun and games until the cost of beef and oil skyrockets.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.
"Says here[1] on this study published by university lab funded by a consortium of the same interests that develop the solar that this is fine"
-smarmy HN linkposters
[1] <link to study that doesn't even support my thesis but you can't tell because it's behind a paywall>
Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems like city people want to exploit the natural lands to produce their electricity. True NIMBY. It's hard to claim to care about the environment when being willing to destroy it when alternatives exist.
They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.
We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.
_O&G industry has entered the chat_
O&G industry is the answer to your question. They have the motive to ensure that their energy production method is dominant and have the funds to send lobbyists to convince/pay off lawmakers/politicians to advance their mission.
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
> huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies
The latter point is doing a lot of heavy lifting because the first point is whitewashing history. Back in the 90's, you had exactly one cable TV provider, one phone provider, maybe one or two cell phone providers if you could afford one, and your internet options were limited to either your cable TV provider or your landline phone provider for DSL, or AOL if you were really unfortunate.
You probably had one trash / sanitation provider, one choice of place to send your kids to school (unless you went the religious school route or could afford a private school, assuming one was nearby). You had one option for getting your mail delivered. One choice for policing, for fire protection and other emergency services, etc. Having only a few options has been a pretty big part of a lot of daily life.
The internet felt more wild and free, because there weren't too many places to go, and most people didn't go there. The internet didn't shrink, but people who started going online went all went to the same places, so all the growth went... where people actually wanted to go.
Here's a practical example: your gmail account today is probably more important to you than your phone number was in the 90s and you can run afoul of some random ML subsystem and lose access. There is no recourse or accountability. Randomly loosing your phone number and not having recourse was not a thing back then.
But yes, I was on the internet in the 90s, the little playground we fled to has grown into a terrible panopticon run by unaccountable people for their own personal interest. NIMBY DC opposition is a terrible proxy to tackle this, but it may be the only tool available.
This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.
On the flip side a datacenter never showed up to a town meeting to screech about how my way of life ought to be illegal, how the businesses I patronize ought to be punitively regulated, how I ought to pay more taxes so that the city can do things I don't want done, etc, etc.
And I say this as someone who already lives near a bunch of industrial sites.
2021 was an absolute disaster. There was a moment where the grid could have completely collapsed. But by some luck, the state avoided that.
Can they do that next time? Shall wait and see.
I’ve been thinking about this lately after the Midtown Manhattan building renovation scare. The overall reporting included a discussion of engineering assumptions saying in effect an office building is designed and constructed with certain weight load assumptions based on the planned use. When performing a conversion those assumptions must be uncovered and evaluated for the new use. While that’s logically reasonable, evidently problematic in practice.
So the question in my mind is this, how do municipalities—especially in rural or suburban areas—come to an understanding of these buildings and their impact on the community? The state must move to slow down less cautious local governments from making bad deals.
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Same with AI stuff. No you don’t need to be at the forefront of whatever is happening. No you won’t be left behind if that actually completely revolutionize the world, you can let the others try and fail to integrate LLMs in their systems. When it is eventually proven to boost ROI in a reliable way and AI vendors have actually figured out a reliable business model, it’s actually pretty simple to learn the technology and integrate in your existing infra
Perhaps the majority of people in Vermont want him to be vocal about it and he is simply doing his actual job.
AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
That goes against my personal experience. It's only people in this small tech bubble that hate it.
In the broader space people love it. I know plenty of people 50+ who use it as their search engine now, people who use it for relationship advice, my wife works with someone who claims to be dating an AI boyfriend (don't ask me how that works). And that's to say nothing of everyone who uses it to write their mundane emails and spreadsheets.
It only seems to be people heavily involved in tech as part of their day job who have any serious concerns about it.
Anecdotal experience doesn't matter. Mine contradicts yours, but my anecdotal experience also isn't strong evidence.
There are countless polls showing that the American public's sentiment towards AI is both negative and falling.
BAD:
- AI companies
- AI datacenters (in my neighborhood)
- AI art
- AI marketing being everywhere
- AI as a search engine
- AI that does my work for me elinks -dump http://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA27UmDH \
|sed '1,/\"body\"/d;/readTime/,$d' \
|tr -d '\134'
More states to come?
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular.
For example, https://newyorkyimby.com/ is pretty much exclusively about housing.
I think it's reasonable to pump the brakes for a year (which is what they've done) and then see where things are in a year, even when there is just a risk to the local community. Worst case scenario, those businesses and data centers end up one year behind schedule, compared to the downsides, that seems acceptable to me.
> One-year construction ban will apply to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, official says
This is targeting "hyperscalers" or AI dcs. Non-AI datacenters consume well below this threshold.
https://garryslist.org/posts/the-campaign-to-kill-american-a...
First rule of agitprop - make it readable.
</sarcasm>
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
You’re technically correct, but missing the point and imo arguing more or less with yourself only.
You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
You handwaved that 40% to a positive. This could easily mean very few people have a positive view of AI.
Generally, in American winner-take-all politics, 60% is considered a massive landslide.
Where does that leave 60, then?
New York heavily restricts construction and infrastructure projects of all kinds. The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.
NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of.
[1]. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/new-york-city-population...
I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.
Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.
AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.
The Mayor is literally implementing stuff to build more affordable housing. I agree that ultimately a lot less regulation is needed to make it easier to simply build, but your take on it belongs in a New York Post editorial. It's not serious.
> The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.
Your dichotomy is bullshit. People in blue collar trades are no more "normal" than most of the people working white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, etc.
I don't think rent controls disincentivize building more because not all buildings can be subject thereto.
> Your dichotomy is bullshit.
Middle class is the 25th-55th percentile of income. Most workers in tech/ finance/ law are above the 55th and most people in the trades are below it. Teachers and the like aren’t going to directly benefit from construction, but would atleast benefit from property taxes.
Fleeting economic opportunities that don't survive the construction phase - a few months most. No one will move from New York to Texas for a chance to be one of the 17 long-term staff at a data center: no one wants to be a data center night man that badly.
As in, do we functionally need them or is this a grift? It seems we are doing less with more. Is there anyone suffering or left out in the cold because we don't have enough compute? Why don't the companies that move more and more work to AI workflows build their own?
What if there is a breakthrough tomorrow and we don't need this much Nvidia silicon anymore, what happens?
The easy ones are:
1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid. 2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.
A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.
Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!
A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.
Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...
If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.
My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.
We can build a better society in which this UBI is scaled as LLMs take over more of the economy. Otherwise, we are clearly headed for more shocks to the American political system as increasingly dubious figures create more phantoms (poor day laborers are "taking your job", China is to blame for American companies taking advantage of "free trade") which will keep tipping towards outright fascism ("enemy of the people", ICE executing people in the streets) to blame for our fundamental societal issues that apparently no one is interested in solving - the societal affects of transformative economic shifts - which no, cannot be stopped or postponed or placed in moratorium indefinitely.
We might as well all push for this now with highly consequential elections approaching over the next 2 - 3 years. Because the insanity will only get worse. We've seen this pattern before. The famous fascists of the 20th century weren't born that way and their path was not inevitable. Many of them actually humorously careened from something more like "far left" communism to fascism as they tried to figure out what would stick in trying to appeal to a world wrought with the consequences of war and economic disruption - delayed affects of the industrial revolution. Don't just try to halt the LLM revolution - you cannot, and you will fail - but be clear about what your demands are.
Moratoriums should have some sense of acceptance criteria or demands. They should not be ways for politicians to simply delay the inevitable because they have no good answers. I think these concerns about power consumption are excuses to deal with the real problems. It's not like energy consumption is thought of as intrinsically bad by the people pushing for these bans. I think LLMs could ultimately be better for society than my neighbor's spotless F-150. It's clear the antagonism to these data centers comes from the inequities around how the gains will be distributed. Ultimately state moratoriums are also ineffective because they will just move to another state, so people in New York will lose in the short term (or benefit - depending on what exactly you object to), but either way we all suffer in the longterm. Make UBI a demand of people running for national office that want your vote.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
Wont move the needle? Go ahead and build shit in your community, I'm happy its being kept out of mine. Stop trying to pretend like NY is trying to legislate the nation by maintaining its own front and backyard.
- Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.
Steven Miller has figured it out
Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.
Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.