Maine Said No to New Data Centers. Other States Are Racing to Follow

I live in a town in the Midwest that just voted down a data center project.

Personally I think it's mostly a proxy vote against bigtech/social-media. People are pretty fed up with their practices but don't have power to act at a national level. But, they DO have power at the local level to show up to town council and talk directly (in-person) to their representatives.

I think the other side of this is that there's this old idea (mostly correct) that municipalities partnering with businesses is good for the community because it brings positive side-effects: jobs, more cashflow in the local economy, etc. This is much less true for data centers. It's just a building that uses power and produces heat/by-products. Generally, employment gains are tiny compared with the old "automaker" labor model of the 1960s-1980s

People recognize this and they're not happy. They don't think it's a good deal for their communities.

This is a major reason I think SpaceX’s space DCs aren’t insane, this is a pretty clear trend. These things don’t bring durable employment, they concentrate costs on infrastructure locally, and their benefits go to the world, so the only way I’ve seen the calculus work for a local community are if they levy property tax on the contents of the DC, use it to subsidize your local property taxes/infrastructure, and then foist the cost due to increased power demand on the wider region. My understanding is this is what Loudon County, VA does with its many DCs, taking the benefits and spreading the costs across the entire PJM region. You effectively have poor Baltimoreans subsidizing the highest median income county in the US via increases in their heating bills. Of course, the rest of the PJM region is annoyed about this and starting to try to obstruct that.

I've been interested in understanding what would make people more amenable to data centers. We kind of need them, though arguably many of the ones being built now are motivated by foolish AI bubble incentives.

Quieter? Lower water use? Lower energy use? Mandatory accessory green spaces? Property taxes that reflect the value being derived relative to inconvenience/pain inflicted on the community? Jobs programs?

I think there's a lot of ideas to mitigate the downsides of data centers. Many of the people who don't want data centers have such proposals that are opposed by different people who don't want data centers.

Mainframe centralized computing like the good old days in a way that will make OpenAI profitable is not coming back, IBM and Digital are gone.

Related:

Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708817

I don't understand why these things need to be built in populated areas.

If it's true that they can be constructed in space and operated remotely, then they can also be placed on container ships, on isolated ocean platforms like oil rigs, or in unpopulated areas on land.

If it's not true that they can be constructed in space, then we'd probably better stop telling ourselves that it's possible.

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