Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianm218 | Hacker News Reader

If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.

View on HN

Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".

TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).

To me that's not sustainable. It just brings in outside workers, distorts the economy in bad way for locals through increased costs, distorts their daily life in a bad way and then it all goes away leaving a void in its wake. Like the olympics.

The Olympics are seen as a net negative for local economies though because it requires tons of local investment for a temporary payoff so the juice (billions of dollars of infra) isn’t worth the squeeze (a few weeks of high utilization followed by a glut).

For data centers you get a medium term boost to the economy + long term tax revenue. The externalities of data centers are quite low if you don’t put them right in someone’s neighborhood.

This is a weird comment to me. Think about green energy, specifically solar panels and wind farms. Almost by definition, the jobs created are only during installation. (Ok, there is a little bit of long-term maintenance, but a tiny fraction.) Would you say the same about those projects?

It is unavoidable that the modern world needs data centers (how many is open for debate). It is a fact of life that most of the jobs associated with data centers are during the installation, not the ongoing maintenance. Again: Are you trying to say that building any and all data centers is bad for your reasons?

I will give another example: When a company builds a highly automated factory, the same occurs. Inside the factory, there are very few highly skills jobs. Most of them are low skill (moving boxes and refilling automated machines that are cheaper than automating the work). Again: Are you saying that we should not be building these highly automated factories for your reasons?

> It is unavoidable that the modern world needs data centers (how many is open for debate)

You know, I’m currently having drinks with a friend who has no connection to the tech world, and asked him about this line explicitly curious of what he thinks about it. He said “I have no idea why such things would be unavoidable”. And that is the sentiment of the general populace towards AI/DCs and etc.

Your reply is disingenuous.

    > a friend who has no connection to the tech world

I assume that you mean that they do not work in the tech world. However, surely they use lots of tech services in their life.

Do they stream film/TV on NetFlix or YouTube? Do they use social media like Facebook or Insagram or TikTok? Does they use email? Do they use WhatsApp or message to chat with friends/family on their mobile phone? Do they have "cloud storage" for their photos? Do they shop online using Amazon? Do they use Google Maps for navigation?

I assume that most adults do at least some of these things. Where does they think the servers run behind the scenes? Simple: In a data center. Now ask your friend to imagine his life without all of those things, because all of them require data centers.

What I'm hearing here is that it's yourself struggling to imagine life w/out data centres.

> ask your friend to imagine his life

As for friends, I have a number of friends not dissimilar to Jill Churnside: https://tracksweshare.com.au/artist/jill-churnside/

You know, not a "he" (as many on this planet are not).

and even programmers who are happy to live with home servers and local LANs.

My sister dates a guy who works on these kinds of projects. He’s based out of Chicago, and goes to remote places like Idaho or Ohio to build them. They put him up in cheap temporary housing, I guess that generates some local money, but he’s very quickly moving on to the next job. They’re not hiring locals for these tasks, they don’t have the skills. The people who are benefitting are mostly local landlords.

If comrade1234 has to get contractors from 90 miles away just to clear some trees, there is no way they are going to hire locals to build a data center.

Some believe the lies. Some just believe in a good golf club.

City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.

Sure but progress over perfection right? More tax revenue puts you in a better spot to attack those problems than not having it.

Even just doing what Northern Virginia does and lowering people’s property taxes gives homeowners more disposable income/ lowers prices for renters which is a start.

You realize that Loudoun County, VA has the highest median family income of any county in the US, right? Its not an economically struggling region that needs permanent jobs.

A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.

We’re talking about rural Wisconsin - there is no world where you need to make a trade off between having school and a data center. Put a school in one field and a data center in a field further away. It just seems like you should tax the data center and then build a school or whatever else you think would help the local economy.

A data center turns the whole town into an industrial zone because of the sound and water pollution. No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.

Merced has a datacenter.

Data centers don’t cause water pollution generally or turn entire towns into industrial zones. There is more than enough room in rural WI towns for industrial and non industrial parts.

> No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.

Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world capital of data centers. And part of that appeal in NoVA is low property taxes due to data centers paying taxes.

There is some real aspects of the data center debate but I don’t think your engaging with them

I mean, how do you explain the backlash then if their byproducts don't generally bother people?

> Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world capital of data centers.

People live in NoVa despite data centers, not because of them. Its proximity to DC makes it intrinsically attractive. Towns in rural nowhere don't have the same innate draw and I don't see how datacenters provide it.

> I mean, how do you explain the backlash then if their byproducts don't generally bother people?

I think the general populace has pretty irrational political stances. For example in NYC where I live "gentrification is bad because it will raise the rent" is a fairly common stance, despite the cause of high rent being restricted housing supply. There's a popular case of residents being OK with a truck stop but blocking any new housing [1].

Congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular and controversial, despite most New Yorkers not being drivers and the policy being very effective in many other cities. Now it's extremely popular.

There is also just a lot misinformation that goes around, the water aspect being one of them. Data center use something like 1/8th the water of the California Almond industry [2]. There is some limited indications anti data center sentiment is spread by US adversaries [3].

[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-dep... [2]. https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa... [3]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

What do you call it when they install 100s of generators outside the building to provide power, create an amazing amount of noise, and a fair bit of pollution, while they claim they are temporary and turn them off 1 day out of 365?

Not to mention consuming quite a bit of water to provide cheaper cooling, instead of using closed loop systems.

If your against on site natural gas I think there is real arguments there and maybe it should be banned.

But there’s a difference to that and being just straight up against data centers or anything being built.

Quick google on stuff from the last week:

2 days ago, Inside the Secretive Deal for a $10 Billion Data Center in ... 21 buildings and roughly 600 diesel generators"

6 days ago "Public hearing set for nearly 650 diesel generators tied to Amazon data center"

4 hours ago, Trump’s Vision for A.I. Dominance Comes With Major Air Pollution ... The first 366 megawatts would come from a power plant made up of more than 800 small gas-burning generators bolted to concrete pads.

Trick is money can influence local governments, even without a clear benefit to the local residents. Then result is people end up with more expensive water, less water, more expensive power, and crazy amounts of noise. Similarly DCs often seem to get special deals from the power company, which raises costs to all users.

Similarly they seem to get a pass on permits: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data center project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits, according to communications between regulators and xAI representatives.

I don't think most people would care if DCs could be hidden by a line of trees, sadly that's not the case.

Worth checking out

https://buildermuse.com/economy/every-state-offering-data-ce...

They often don't. In my area the locals gave them giant tax breaks in the hope of bringing in jobs that dont exist.

> If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes

if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle

This is a needlessly low effort reply that hurts the discussion.

Some data centers are paying lots of taxes and upgrading local grids, others are bribing local politicians or lobbying for abatements.

That is a much more substantive discussion than blanket anti growth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com