The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts | Hacker News Reader

The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts

theatlantic.com

8 pointspaulpauper19 comments

I've listened to the noise on local TV news where they went to the location (here's a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474)

I would put the noise in the "fact" column.

If I was a governor and my state had the resources (land, power, water, people etc) to build a few of these I’d let them. With a few caveats:

They’d have to be grid neutral. So generate your own power or pay for new generation whatever it is but your data center can’t raise electricity prices.

Power generation can’t be loud or otherwise environmentally annoying. No extra noise. Smells. Pollution. You gotta find a way to get power without harming the environment.

Property taxes for the building and such are 5x what they are for any other such building and are binding for 10 years. If you build it in year one and the bust happens and it’s dormant idk the taxes are in escrow and are due us for the next ten years.

All infra necessary or impacts of it developers have to build and pay for. If you need roads or are gonna impact them to build it then you gotta build alternatives.

And the water used must be recycled and self sustaining. If you need a million gallons fine but that’s all we can’t have data centers sucking up all the water.

Do that and you get my blessing.

I realize these requirements are tall orders but there’s basically infinite money and they’re still far cheaper than space data centers.

Far cheaper? There's free cooling in space. No need to overpay for water or recycle it. There's also free electricity -- once you pay for the solar panels. And there are no property taxes or corporate taxes.

Given that folks like you think there's infinite money and they can make outrageous demands for taxes, I think it's not obvious that terrestrial centers are "far cheaper".

> free cooling

Vacuum is an insulator. I think you may have been mislead.

Mislead or … work at an Elon company. Shudder.

Perhaps you've heard of radiant cooling?

SpaceX has already deployed thousands of functioning computers in space. I think if the vacuum were an issue, we would have heard about it.

it's not a trivial engineering challenge to scale that into space. we're not talking a single sattelite we're talking 100k GPUs and servers

Oh no, this thread has been discovered by Elon's space cadets.

> And the water used must be recycled and self sustaining. If you need a million gallons fine but that’s all we can’t have data centers sucking up all the water.

They can have a closed loop cooling system, but it costs more energy to run and would eat into their profits. so they use evaporative cooling, cheaper, but consumes entire towns worth of water. If this is pumped from the ground, round water levels dry up in all around and peoples wells dry up.

Then the former approach is going to be the only allowed one in this hypothetical where I’m in charge

What political debate is married to the facts? Name one.

Really, for most debates it makes no sense to call the entirety of the conversation "married to" or "divorced from" from the facts, because even if one particular "side" of the conversation is "married to" the facts, another "side" might not be. For example, a debate between a "humans don't significantly contribute to climate change" side and a "humans do significantly contribute to climate change" side is not going to be "married to" the facts when considered as a whole, even though the latter side is "married to" the facts (in some conexts).

https://archive.is/SknST

Here’s what I’d tell the industry: too bad, so sad, you spent the last decade burning the trust of your consumers. Facts don’t matter anymore.

Your customers used to be excited for technology. Getting a Facebook account was fun and exciting. Getting a smartphone was about solving cool problems and messing around with beer drinking apps. We all know how that turned out.

Now we are being sold AI as something that’s going to steal our jobs and the companies developing AI are marketing them by saying they’re going to literally destroy humanity. This is after the leaders of these companies already decided to make our existing SaaS landscape an enshittified surveillance economy.

Fuck off. I’m not going to allow an AI data center in my back yard. What do I get out of it? It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue for my town because barely anyone works there and no commerce takes place locally.

> Facts don’t matter anymore.

That's the world Trump and friends want. Are you signing onto that?

> It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue

Facts still matter, Virginia (the data center capital of the country) is raising revenues specifically from data centers

https://mgrid.org/2026/06/30/virginia-enacts-first-us-data-c...

We can and should tax data centers and more. Historically states have competed for industrial projects by giving tax breaks, but that does not have to be how it is.

The idea that the individual citizen has to assume blame for erosion of facts-based society is somewhat insulting. I don’t own a cable news channel. I didn’t found Cambridge Analytica. I don’t own Meta or TikTok feeds. Don’t blame me as the individual for the lack of facts. Let’s not forget the numerous lies tech industry CEOs have told us. Why should I commit to facts when they won’t?

It is the tech industry’s own system that has spread the misinformation about data centers. They’re just dogfooding their own ideal society and oopsed their way into feeling a negative result for themselves. They can turn off the algorithm right now and stop pushing engagement bait and put all our feeds back into chronological mode. If they did that a long time ago, I bet the outrage over AI data centers would be insignificant. How did that outrage spread in the first place?

This isn’t about facts, this is about politics. Politics are “who is on my side, who is going to help me, who has wronged me,” etc.

Virginia as you pointed out now has to make a special tax just to make the data centers worth having. The implication is that property, payroll, income, and sales tax aren’t enough to make them a net positive for the state.

Data centers have no almost no interaction with the local economy. They don’t rely on local suppliers, barely employ anyone, and don’t sell or buy local products and services in the area.

That is a vindictive way to view the world. It'll be a race to the bottom if everyone gives up on facts and says whatever is politically expedite. I would urge you not to give into it, although I certainly understand the frustration.

Again, blame the individual for being “vindictive.” When will we start blaming people in power for being “vindictive” against the people?

Yeah the public loves being told by elites that we're being hysterical. Funny part is, the only upside presented, the one we're supposedly so tragically overlooking, is tax revenue.

Paying me to accept something I would otherwise reject, that doesn't benefit me and may harm me, is called a bribe, isn't it? Or a bit more charitably, getting me on your side by offering a (usually not significant) share of the profits.

Two blog posts I'd like to refer you to:

Adam Mastroianni: "Incentives Are For Losers" https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-lo...

Matt Stoller: "The Rage Of The Billionaires Is Coming" https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-rag...

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