This will encourage developers to put these facilities in more human-friendly places. I knew the clock was ticking when xAI started expanding aggressively in suburban Memphis. These facilities are loud, they emit pollution (when power is generated onsite), and they need very little staff. After the initial construction there is zero upside for the local community. They should be located away from population centers.
more likely they'll get built in different countries with more lax regulations. This is probably going to end up like manufacturing where it's all done overseas.
Property taxes are a significant contributor to the purse of many cities and counties, and datacenters are expensive real estate in terms of the assessed valuations. Sales tax also.
For some cities and counties this will be a loss if those developments move.
Not appreciably in most municipality so far, I guess what your saying is nice in theory but isn't being born out in reality in the simple majority of places.
For those questioning this conclusion, 4 of top 10 states by GW of DC under development flipped parties and elected governors that made curtailing DC development or increasing regs part of their platform. That's 130GW of the ~350GW pipeline in the US.
This obviously matters. These states have the leverage. Look at the issues Oracle is having in NM.
The scale of the market fuckery is incredible. We are trying to install an MR scanner. Chillers are becoming hard to get and on long back order. The supplier says that the units we want are not really the right units for data centres but due to shortages of the units data centres really want, they are picking up alternatives.
It just shows the utter hollowing out of the US industrial base to me.
Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.
This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.
The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.
Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
From my time at hyperscalers ... realistic for low power traditional DC (lot of regular rackmount CPU server) ... unrealistic for the power and cooling requirements of inference and crypto mining
Many of the votes are not full ban on DC but ban on massive energy dense DC
I'm sure there was a "spray and pray" attitude, but also some stunning incompetence... Republican PACs spent a lot of money advertising for a candidate who was running in Portland, Maine... in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country.
It is not as if data center development is suddenly ended. Democrats have paired up with tech in the past. Tech might want to make friends with those that hold the purse stings. Regulatory capture is still in the cards. Projects on the way are still on the way.
It might be that tech would like some regulations / laws that slow data center development (maybe a good thing) if they think it has just turned into an arms race that has gotten out of hand. Investors might think this also (S&P 500 up ~1.5% as I write this).
Yeah, and both their politicans and constituencies were directly betrayed by them. They made their bed and now they must sleep in it. Many of the dems who won made data centers and AI a part of their platfrom.
I am a little hopeful here in Texas. We have needed change for a while. Still, we are talking about politicians and while there maybe be a mandate from voters it is a long and narrow road to solutions that are good for everybody (especially the constituents).
The nice thing about politicians is they can be held accountable by constituents, per the Constitution.
Data center developers, who should be equally distrusted (but seem to get a pass), are not beholden to you.
It will take developers and politicians working together to find a solution, rather than let developers do whatever they can to maximize profits without regulation or public process.
I’m a progressive through and through, but this is the one aspect of the whole platform I don’t like. I am in the build data centers everywhere, make tokens dirt cheap, and work as hard as possible to make models more and more intelligent camp. The only thing I would like to see is that we keep building massive data centers, but mandate that they have to be powered by their own newly built solar, wind, and battery banks. This would let us keep our lead in frontier models, as well as building out brand new sources of green energy. I believe Massachusetts (?) has already passed legislation that accomplishes this.
Darn right! Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can see any value in this, except those at the top. Yes, LLMs make us more efficient in SOME cases, but does that improve life for the average man or even average programmer? Or even the end user, who has to deal with more AI-generated ads and scams now?
The only end benefit seems to be that more people can make more software now, and it's not even clear that this will be a good thing in the long run, considering how much technical debt we're accumulating.
That hundreds of hackers can complete a few neat hobby projects doesn't really count as a serious benefit, by the way.
If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
For a random non-software example: My mother has an HR job and absolutely loves it for working with spreadsheets, sorting through email, making mail merges, reviewing the policy documents for errors as she works on them, and so on. She spends less time in document hell and more time getting things done or talking to people.
Personally, I find the ability to quickly remove technical debt to be more practically valuable than the ability to quickly create software. A lot of the smaller shops I work with never had the time or money to properly manage, update, or retire their infrastructure. Now many are in a better shape than my own stuff has been because you don't need to be an uber nerd spending a weekend to upgrade an ancient & neglected MediaWiki box (or whatever) anymore.
Overall I do believe it is a productivity win for software. However, the insane amount of money spend on AI (training models, building datacenters and even usage in some cases) is ridiculous. Hopefully that will get lower soon.
I say this out of genuine curiosity: does Florida even make sense for data centers with the increasing weather patterns there? Feels like every time I read news about Florida, if it’s not political, it’s some natural disaster.
I assume there must be companies doing things like this there but would the big co’s actually want anything there?
I just used Florida for one counter example but Tennessee and Alabama just rolled out the red carpet, as results have come in, too. The usual course of things like this is the corporations will play different jurisdictions off each other to get more and more off taxpayers dime like pro sports stadiums and Amazon heralded HQ2 - thankfully voters in a lot of states mentioned rejected unlimited data centers - but it is not universal. The fight continues.
This will encourage developers to put these facilities in more human-friendly places. I knew the clock was ticking when xAI started expanding aggressively in suburban Memphis. These facilities are loud, they emit pollution (when power is generated onsite), and they need very little staff. After the initial construction there is zero upside for the local community. They should be located away from population centers.
more likely they'll get built in different countries with more lax regulations. This is probably going to end up like manufacturing where it's all done overseas.
Datacenters contain few jobs so unlike manufacturing this doesn't look like a loss.
Property taxes are a significant contributor to the purse of many cities and counties, and datacenters are expensive real estate in terms of the assessed valuations. Sales tax also.
For some cities and counties this will be a loss if those developments move.
Not appreciably in most municipality so far, I guess what your saying is nice in theory but isn't being born out in reality in the simple majority of places.
For those questioning this conclusion, 4 of top 10 states by GW of DC under development flipped parties and elected governors that made curtailing DC development or increasing regs part of their platform. That's 130GW of the ~350GW pipeline in the US.
This obviously matters. These states have the leverage. Look at the issues Oracle is having in NM.
https://dcmap.us/insights/pipeline/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/oracle-data-center-force-maj...
Maybe we'll be able to buy computers again sometime before the end of the decade.
The scale of the market fuckery is incredible. We are trying to install an MR scanner. Chillers are becoming hard to get and on long back order. The supplier says that the units we want are not really the right units for data centres but due to shortages of the units data centres really want, they are picking up alternatives.
It just shows the utter hollowing out of the US industrial base to me.
Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.
This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.
The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.
Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
How unrealistic are modular data centers with battery and solar built in, with no need for liquid cooling?
Something that can be trucked in with no negative effects on local populations
From my time at hyperscalers ... realistic for low power traditional DC (lot of regular rackmount CPU server) ... unrealistic for the power and cooling requirements of inference and crypto mining
Many of the votes are not full ban on DC but ban on massive energy dense DC
I'm from Argentina and I was getting Ads on twitch about how datacenters are good for local economies in Indiana.
Wonder how much money the burned.
I'm sure there was a "spray and pray" attitude, but also some stunning incompetence... Republican PACs spent a lot of money advertising for a candidate who was running in Portland, Maine... in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country.
It is not as if data center development is suddenly ended. Democrats have paired up with tech in the past. Tech might want to make friends with those that hold the purse stings. Regulatory capture is still in the cards. Projects on the way are still on the way.
It might be that tech would like some regulations / laws that slow data center development (maybe a good thing) if they think it has just turned into an arms race that has gotten out of hand. Investors might think this also (S&P 500 up ~1.5% as I write this).
> Democrats have paired up with tech in the past
Yeah, and both their politicans and constituencies were directly betrayed by them. They made their bed and now they must sleep in it. Many of the dems who won made data centers and AI a part of their platfrom.
> Tech might want to make friends…
They might find that tricky after they sold out to right wing causes last election.
Regulations just mean Democrats get to pick the winners, which will most likely match donations.
Which is what Republicans were already doing, while agreeing to NDAs that kept their constituents in the dark.
With the mandate from voters, hopefully we see less secret development and more open communication about the deals being cut.
I am a little hopeful here in Texas. We have needed change for a while. Still, we are talking about politicians and while there maybe be a mandate from voters it is a long and narrow road to solutions that are good for everybody (especially the constituents).
The nice thing about politicians is they can be held accountable by constituents, per the Constitution.
Data center developers, who should be equally distrusted (but seem to get a pass), are not beholden to you.
It will take developers and politicians working together to find a solution, rather than let developers do whatever they can to maximize profits without regulation or public process.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50365982
Maybe now the tech oligarchs and their lackeys will realize that anti-AI and anti-data center sentiment isn't just some Chinese influence campaign.
Not just any Chinese influence campaign.
It's a very successful Chinese influence campaign.
Ahh.. yes, dismiss actual job losses and nuisance buildings as useful idiots, very new concept, very credible.
It's not that hard to build these in a way that isn't mendacious, the total moral collapse of the hyperscalers is not something to celebrate.
I’m a progressive through and through, but this is the one aspect of the whole platform I don’t like. I am in the build data centers everywhere, make tokens dirt cheap, and work as hard as possible to make models more and more intelligent camp. The only thing I would like to see is that we keep building massive data centers, but mandate that they have to be powered by their own newly built solar, wind, and battery banks. This would let us keep our lead in frontier models, as well as building out brand new sources of green energy. I believe Massachusetts (?) has already passed legislation that accomplishes this.
Darn right! Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can see any value in this, except those at the top. Yes, LLMs make us more efficient in SOME cases, but does that improve life for the average man or even average programmer? Or even the end user, who has to deal with more AI-generated ads and scams now?
The only end benefit seems to be that more people can make more software now, and it's not even clear that this will be a good thing in the long run, considering how much technical debt we're accumulating.
That hundreds of hackers can complete a few neat hobby projects doesn't really count as a serious benefit, by the way.
If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
For a random non-software example: My mother has an HR job and absolutely loves it for working with spreadsheets, sorting through email, making mail merges, reviewing the policy documents for errors as she works on them, and so on. She spends less time in document hell and more time getting things done or talking to people.
Personally, I find the ability to quickly remove technical debt to be more practically valuable than the ability to quickly create software. A lot of the smaller shops I work with never had the time or money to properly manage, update, or retire their infrastructure. Now many are in a better shape than my own stuff has been because you don't need to be an uber nerd spending a weekend to upgrade an ancient & neglected MediaWiki box (or whatever) anymore.
Overall I do believe it is a productivity win for software. However, the insane amount of money spend on AI (training models, building datacenters and even usage in some cases) is ridiculous. Hopefully that will get lower soon.
Florida still elected pro data center governor so it ignores that in very short article.
I say this out of genuine curiosity: does Florida even make sense for data centers with the increasing weather patterns there? Feels like every time I read news about Florida, if it’s not political, it’s some natural disaster.
I assume there must be companies doing things like this there but would the big co’s actually want anything there?
I just used Florida for one counter example but Tennessee and Alabama just rolled out the red carpet, as results have come in, too. The usual course of things like this is the corporations will play different jurisdictions off each other to get more and more off taxpayers dime like pro sports stadiums and Amazon heralded HQ2 - thankfully voters in a lot of states mentioned rejected unlimited data centers - but it is not universal. The fight continues.
Florida is immaterial and effectively irrelevant to the DC buildout
And you seem to be unaware that Florida was the one single outlier in an otherwise massive rejection of of the status quo.