Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
[0] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i...
I mean, yes. Amazon can likely do this. But is this strategy really in keeping with its long term interests? I mean, look at the comments in the rest of this very topic. Do you want a communist insurrection? This is literally how you get communist insurrections. People are fucking pissed, and the bourge^M^M^M^M funding-focused growth-minded startup set here are throwing gasoline on the fire.
Should 6 years of planning be thrown away because data centers have recently become fashionable to hate?
Should a century of infrastructure investment be thrown away because cooking the planet has recently become fashionable to hate?
Yes. It should. Will it? No.
Really both sides are insane in this battle. People are angry about social change, injustice, perceived loss of status and are taking out those frustrations on totems like "Buildings Owned by Big Tech". Which is wrong. But it's equally wrong to ignore those concerns and try to align with their political enemies, which only makes this worse. (We saw exactly this thing happen with the vaccine madness just half a decade ago!)
To wit: we're all going to hell in a handbasket and this community is 100% as much at fault as the big data opposition front.
The "noise and pollution" of a datacenter are bordering on nonexistent. The same goes for water use concerns and more. The environmental concerns are extremely overblown - but NIMBYs really don't need much to get going.
Did it ever occur to you that politicians signing a 'binding agreement' may not be the same as public interest? That they are often paid to hide the full implications from the public? Do you understand that some people actually want to live and raise family in a livable environment?
I understand that Ayn Rand fans who do not have to suffer the consequences of that philosophy or 'futurists' who think purely in 'make AI go brrr is cool' do not understand this, but some people place value on other things in life besides this and yes, they do deserve a place at the table.
As generally a tech optimist, but also someone deeply aware of the awful trajectory modern tech is on, such as their waste, war on general purpose computing, ownership, privacy and repairability, I think a lot of this needs rethinking and perhaps of brute forcing your way to stripping people of their livehoods by polluting, straining the grid and depriving people of places they'd want to live in, slow down and consider if there's not a smarter, more efficient, more humane way to move forward.
Failing to do so may produce a backslash that will harm even the things we love about our space.
The 'contract' is not sacred above everything. Especially when that contract affects a lot more people than those who signed it as 'binding'.
It’s not on the community to adhere to the companies looking to make a profit while ignoring how their presence affects those around them. Quite the opposite really.
> “…by adhering to local zoning rules set 45 years ago”
I live on Long Island NY. Here on LI and Upstate there are a surprising number of former industrial land and abandoned buildings. It’s the whole package—loss of jobs, years of post-industrial decline, lost revenue and old rules on the books. Ripe for a new industry which, like remote workers, doesn’t need to be located next to the larger communities where their work product is consumed. Gentrification or redevelopment of agricultural land into boiling data centers are the outcomes.
> “It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy …” Bozzo said.
It’s a dirty fight. All sides.
Amazon wants to build on cheap land, and not on parcels the cities want cleaned up.
I’m wondering why these data centers are such a nuisance. We’ve had data centers for years. Is it just the fast growth and number? And is there good public data on their sustainability regarding water and electricity and environmental impact? If cities have failed, it’s turning a blind eye from collecting this data.
Philosophical opposition to AI's impact on society.
Resource utilization: power and water.
Pollution: natural gas turbines on site and broadly the pollution of power generation, and noise pollution.
Subsidies to multitrillion dollar companies at the expense of taxpayers.
Impact on local community: traffic, construction, impact to surrounding home prices.
Lies about the benefits of datacenters: talk of how much money it might bring governments, while no dividends are paid to citizens impacted by the negative effects above.
---
If a datacenter was quiet, powered by renewables, water-efficient in a place without water supply insecurity, and funded by the builders instead of taxpayers, most complaints would be solved.
These operators are in such a rush to build that they are ignoring all decency and resident concern in many cases.
I think this is the real reason, while the others don't make that much sense when we really think about it.
Large datacenters are normally limited to industrial zoned land, so they're "competing" for space with other industrial projects, and their externalities are typically mild compared to other industrial projects.
Most datacenters create little traffic, minimal pollution, and no bad odors. They do use substantial power and water, but they pay for it (though in certain cases the economics aren't perfect).
I'd much rather live near a datacenter than a dump, sewage facility, refinery, etc. etc.
How does this square with the fact that one county in Virginia derives half of its budget from datacenters?
And take advantage of old laws never written to address the industry.
That's likely a big part of it.
AI data centers need an order of magnitude or more power than a cloud data center, and a lot more are being built.
Before with the lower power requirements and with slow and steady growth a data center project was handled by the utilities just like they handled a new factory or a new large shopping mall. The utility might need to add substation of some local transmission lines but it wasn't a big deal.
An AI data center uses so much more power that even if the utility has enough capacity overall to cover it, the AI data center needs that all at one site meaning quit a bit more new infrastructure needs to be built.
Now add in the number being built. The utility now is much less likely to have generation capacity to cover them, meaning the utility will have to buy electricity on the open market which is more expensive.
Another factor is that many AI data centers cannot wait for that and so find sources of energy other than the grid to tide them over for the several years it might take before the grid is ready for them. These sources are often not good for their neighbors.
Maybe I missed it, but the article doesn't seem to say what the "circumvention"/"loophole" that Amazon used was? It seems like Amazon went through the correct city permitting/legal processes years ago, and now residents want to complain about it years later because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic?
Like if Amazon followed the official process here, what's the problem? At some point you have to declare an approval final and allow a company to move forward with construction.
> ...the site had gone through a long approval process, which required public notices and public-comment periods. However, when Gilroy resident Rosa Rodriguez wanted to state her concern about the damage a data center can do to a region suffering from drought, she was told that the comment period had already lapsed in 2024
Is the "circumvention" the headline refers to that public commentary periods are time-boxed? But how could they not be time-boxed?
In fairness to the residents, the negative implications of data centers was probably not well known to them in 2024, but it seems to me that (at least based on the article) all the processes & rules were followed.
Building infrastructure and housing in the US is painfully slow and a huge tax on everyone, almost everything should be fast tracked. We have some of the most productive economic zones in the world (SF <-> LA, Boston <-> DC corridor) and we have made it largely illegal to build housing and transit in these areas due to bureaucracy and red tape.
Do you think the high speed rail between SF and LA needs more rounds of community input?
As for fast tracking, there's a reason property developers are banned from donating to political parties here (corruption findings relating to property developers are fairly common, the latest one has caught up the opposition leader of Australia). Make the process open, make it fair, have a proper plan and then less money need be wasted.
I hope one day Amazon or any AI company installs a data center next to your home. Then you will finally understand
If someone’s house has a dog that barks continuously, you aren’t going to say building houses here are restricted. Instead you restrict barking dogs, which is what cities do.
The problem here is that the "justice" system is all too happy to come down on individuals, while giving corpos a pass. If you or I buy a loud car stereo, we can get fined for making too much noise. Cities can even pass new noise ordinances or new methods of measurement that are post facto of our purchase, and we still have to conform to them! But when a corpo does something similar, the kid gloves go on, their ongoing behavior (eg noise pollution) gets "grandfathered", and there is nothing that anybody can do. Restore the rule of law - meaning equal protection under it rather than one-sided laws written by corpos - to restore the public's trust that new data centers (and construction/business in general!) will be accountable.
But barring that, I'd say it's only smart to prevent this industry from getting a foothold in your community. Most are going to be great neighbors, but the few that aren't you can't do anything about. So why risk it?
Arguably if new information arrives which changes the risks or impacts of a project, especially if the project was initially on some kind of fast-track process, then projects should be subject to re-reviewed and scrutiny (which I would expect to have a standard legal process).
What "new information" arose aside from the general datacenter backlash that's been brewing this year?
This ain’t the culture war. The public at large is fairly united on one side of this across the typical US political divides. If you want to dismiss this with a cute label to pretend that there aren’t any real concerns here, the only label that comes close to matching the actual dispute is class war.
> because data centers are this year's culture war hot topic?
Or because they didn't notice until they saw actual construction.
> There were no public meetings or votes before a lone city staffer gave Amazon.com the green light last July to build a 438,500-square-foot data center on 56 acres of farmland 30 miles south of San Jose.
> Amazon’s project was approved with a single signature—by the town’s community-development director—because it met zoning criteria set 45 years ago for industrial development along a freeway.
> Mayor Greg Bozzo said other big industrial projects have been approved in the same manner over the years, but didn’t cause any uproar.
> “It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” Bozzo said.
On it's face this is an incredibly dim-witted comment by the mayor. The people are generally angry about Amazon building data centers, but they're particularly angry at their city council which has been working to conceal the project from exactly the people they have a duty to inform.
It's not about excoriation of Amazon. It's about regulatory capture. And saying Amazon "did nothing wrong" is just being blind to the problem.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i...
I’m glad they were able to build their datacenter.
For all the talk of "negative externalities", they sure aren't shy about imposing them on others.
Being eager to uncritically lap up any FUD thrown your way is definitely a personal failing. Let alone spreading that FUD. But the fact that NIMBYs are allowed to wield an outsized power and do things like stall nuclear power for decades? That companies can engage in underhanded "find an activist group that wants to NIMBY in an area where the competitor is trying to build and then just fund it"? Failure of an incentive structure.
1786206931 | Amazon Built a Data Center in a California Town Without Anyone Noticing | https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223357
https://www.fastcompany.com/3026312/what-silicon-valley-woul...
Silicon Valley tech should build mixed use high rise housing and datacenters right on their corporate campuses. All infrastructure to make this a reality is on them to provide. Zuck will be given a special exemption that allows him to build into the parts of that stinky salt marsh already approved for his semiabandoned shantytown.
Amazon believes that the AI agents need a new home more than humans do and would rather build homes for these agents than for humans.
But of course, the advantages are obvious to them:
1) 24/7 intelligence when you need it.
2) Tokens can be generated cheaply, meaning lots of work for 1 / 100th of the price of a human.
3) Knowledge can stay with the agent and will never leave the company and the agent has no breaks or weekends.
No wonder Amazon saw something like this, wanted it so badly and ignored humans to build more homes for c̶l̶a̶n̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ AI agents. Such a sad state of affairs.
I can only imagine the level of outrage that would instantly ensue if Amazon announced they were getting into the home-building business.