[HN Gopher] Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billi...
___________________________________________________________________
Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data
centers
Author : sseagull
Score : 308 points
Date : 2026-01-30 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wpr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wpr.org)
| bell-cot wrote:
| The most important news is in the subtitle -
|
| > Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative
| proposals to make the process more transparent.
|
| Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government
| _really_ needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do
| in secret.
| rayiner wrote:
| I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in
| misinformation about water use and 5G signals?
| nemo wrote:
| You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out,
| you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals
| deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably)
| assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust,
| and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal?
| https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing
| this out to show my science teacher decades ago.
| toast0 wrote:
| Of course it's still around. They're still putting this
| crap in schools!
| throwhn1232 wrote:
| Then you don't get to build there, obviously. "Oh they're too
| stupid to know better, let's do what we want anyway" doesn't
| seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework
| would be just as applicable to actually undesirable
| industrial plants and the like. They're free to
| convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the
| poors around
| newsclues wrote:
| Secrecy needs a time limit.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first
| place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If
| the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they
| should be open.
| bloak wrote:
| They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for
| commercial reasons". They always do.
| 9dev wrote:
| Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules
| commercial reasons.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite
| commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our
| servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
| petcat wrote:
| In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities
| can submit bids for projects they want. And in the
| commercial space the bidding process is usually
| confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of
| public private partnership.
|
| Of course the municipality could just say that they don't
| want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine
| too.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate
| benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the
| relationship between the public and private sector should
| be.
| petcat wrote:
| > the municipality could just say that they don't want
| the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The submitting of corporate largess to multiple
| government entities for bids is (imo) a de facto hostile
| act, and should be treated as such.
| bell-cot wrote:
| There _are_ valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King
| to know they 're planning to build a new location in
| Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice
| versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to
| expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to
| demand top dollar. Etc.
|
| But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we
| can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing
| business.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.
|
| OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers,
| the latter may decide to build outside the city limits.
| Which might become a problem over time, by holding down
| Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting
| citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on
| their own homes, and Smallville having too little money
| to afford nice things that they want.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| If McD builds outside of Smallville, they don't get any
| of the services that Smallville taxes subsidize.
| Smallville taxes serve Smallvillians, not corporate
| villains.
| bell-cot wrote:
| True. But McD may decide that the services in developer-
| friendly Small Township are just as good, for their use
| case. And Smallville residents may be content to drive
| another 500 yards down Smallville-Littleton Rd., to spend
| their money at the new McD out in Smallville Twp.
|
| In public policy, everything is a tradeoff.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| In which case, one might expect Borger Kong to build in
| developer-unfriendly Smallville, because they will
| capture the people driving outside of Smallville. All
| your arguments are easily countered by basic supply and
| demand hyoptheticals.
|
| There is no reason that McDonald's shouldn't own the risk
| of developing a McDonalds, and instead make secret deals
| with local governments to offset some of that risk. Thats
| a cost that should be borne by the business.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in
| the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when
| it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world
| where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a
| _less_ transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed
| datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a
| chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the
| other side of the creek.
| imglorp wrote:
| It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people".
| Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local
| government should be completely transparent with secrets
| explicitly forbidden.
|
| Secret deals with corporations is corruption.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| > Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company
|
| How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Turns out sucking up all the information there is and
| displaying ads is worth a lot.
| parpfish wrote:
| That's still a little mind boggling.
|
| They don't make anything or directly help somebody else make
| something.
|
| they provide a platform that can maybe sometimes nudges an
| individual purchasing decisions in one direction.
| simonw wrote:
| They capture around 15% of global ad spending.
|
| $200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a
| trillion dollars.
| celticninja wrote:
| because it is all made up
| nythroaway048 wrote:
| This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World
| playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land
| is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after
| having _all_ the facts laid out for them in public.
| yunohn wrote:
| > "I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city
| acted in as transparent a way as they could," Campbell said.
|
| The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.
| insuranceguru wrote:
| It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until
| the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait
| accompli for jobs. The interesting part will be the resource
| strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small
| municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals
| include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak
| load events?
| parpfish wrote:
| Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break
| it down by jobs per sqft, I can't imagine it compares well to
| any other type of industrial development
| infecto wrote:
| They bring in temporary construction jobs but once running
| they provide no meaningful jobs.
| parpfish wrote:
| If we just want to front load a bunch of construction jobs,
| I vote for some megalithic stone structures.
|
| Let's give something to the archeologists 5,000 years in
| the future.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use
| copious amounts of water.
|
| If we haven't collectively established at this point that
| LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution"
| are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the
| world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but
| money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about
| jobs, or water. At all.
|
| If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down
| after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have
| regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US
| because of the "Safety" boogieman.
|
| I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about
| other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that
| social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more
| convincing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > use copious amounts of water.
|
| If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop
| systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and
| maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer
| months.
|
| On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as
| heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits,
| you're using literally _tons of water_.
|
| Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled
| data center.
| basket_horse wrote:
| > If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut
| down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.
|
| I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news
| it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People
| have been committing suicide off google searches for years.
| There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that
| mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems
| like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for
| other reasons
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Propaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction
| of an LLM or not?
|
| That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at
| best, insulting to the memory of those lost.
|
| Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than
| acknowledging it does.
|
| LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things.
| Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat
| things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by
| LLMs before we un-brainwash ourselves? At least one more
| I guess.
| basket_horse wrote:
| Comparing chatGPT to ICE and dynamite is reaching... my
| hunch is that most of the people who who killed
| themselves at the direction of an LLM were already
| mentally unstable. What about the people who were
| planning on committing suicide and were talked out of it
| by LLMs? Are we counting those anywhere? If it's truly
| causing a suicide crisis I would imagine the rate of
| suicide would be spiking. Is that the case?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > my hunch is that most of the people who who killed
| themselves at the direction of an LLM were already
| mentally unstable
|
| Your hunch is "meh, couldn't be helped?" :(
| basket_horse wrote:
| Yes, exactly
| insuranceguru wrote:
| That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in
| construction. Once operational, a massive data center might
| only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.
|
| Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might
| employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is
| terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid
| to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
| jauer wrote:
| Unlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these
| datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to
| eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to
| a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus
| with several data halls this means that there's work for
| those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you
| don't have the steel and concrete work happening that went
| into the shell, but it's more than a handful of operations
| people.
|
| From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories
| from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly
| well-automated to the extent that I'd see just a few people
| on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines
| or handling shipping and receiving.
| m4ck_ wrote:
| Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of
| dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting
| vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really
| needs to be done onsite.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning
| and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing,
| HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small
| municipal grids aren't scoped for.
|
| Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all
| the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of
| a button?
|
| This incident will be reported. /s
|
| On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the
| last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize
| that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).
| insuranceguru wrote:
| Ha, point taken. But the 'NIMBY' argument is interesting here
| because unlike a housing development (which uses local
| resources for local people), a data center extracts local
| resources (water/power) to export value globally. It's an
| extraction economy dynamic, just with electrons instead of
| ore.
| simianwords wrote:
| > These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small
| municipal grids aren't scoped for
|
| Source?
|
| Here's why I think this is wrong
|
| "A typical (average) data center on-site water use (~9k
| gal/day) is roughly 1/14th of an average golf course's
| irrigation (~130k gal/day).
|
| On-site data center freshwater: ~50 million gal/day Golf course
| irrigation: ~2.08 billion gal/day"
|
| On both local and global levels - golf uses significantly more
| water than data centres.
| delichon wrote:
| NIMBY for data centers is opportunity for SpaceX. When they
| saturate the demand for communication, data processing demand
| will be ramping up with no apparent ceiling. The merger between
| SpaceX and xAI positions them to benefit both from the AI
| revolution, and from the resistance to it. It's like a
| hypothetical 19th century textile company that managed to profit
| from Luddite riots by using them to help move production to Umpa
| Loompa.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Is this satire? I can't even tell anymore. If so, bravo.
| brightball wrote:
| Yep. That was my first thought when I saw the SpaceX & xAI
| merger news.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
| timmg wrote:
| Do data centers in space actually make sense? I can't figure
| out how that's possible. But some people seem to believe they
| do(?)
| janice1999 wrote:
| > Do data centers in space actually make sense?
|
| No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting
| payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the
| issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
| simianwords wrote:
| this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting
| on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way
| more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to
| this have thought about.
|
| This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure
| but it should say a lot that these companies are investing
| in them.
|
| I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?
|
| Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in
| this. Even China is.
|
| What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would
| they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of
| you that it is not going to work?
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| Google is hardly betting on it; they are exploring the
| feasibility of it and are frank about the engineering
| challenges: > significant engineering challenges remain,
| such as thermal management, high-bandwidth ground
| communications, and on-orbit system reliability.[1]
|
| [1] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-
| scalabl...
| simianwords wrote:
| why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has
| constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about
| it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and
| invest enormous amounts of R&D.
|
| You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is
| grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its
| clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.
|
| > Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we're just a decade away
| from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
|
| Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been
| operating for a while. But why would you say they are
| hardly betting on it?
|
| As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious
| about it?
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| I never said Google wasn't serious; I said they are
| hardly betting on it relative to their other capital
| expenditures. Google rightfully describes this as a
| "moonshot." To date, the only public hardware commitment
| is two prototype satellites in 2027 for a feasibility
| study. Compared to the billions pouring into Waymo,
| DeepMind, and terrestrial data centers, this doesn't yet
| qualify as an "enormous" financial bet, even if the
| engineering intent is serious.
| simianwords wrote:
| i agree with you then. lets agree that the intent is
| serious.
| lossolo wrote:
| Everyone were also betting on quantum computing and the
| hydrogen energy revolution.
|
| My napkin math says that, for a system at around 75degC,
| you would need about 13,000 square meters of radiators in
| space to reject 10 MW of heat.
| simianwords wrote:
| why do you think they are betting on it if it so obvious
| to you that it won't work?
| madeforhnyo wrote:
| Just because some CEOs pour billions into fantasy
| projects it doesn't mean they're viable. Otherwise we all
| would be in the metaverse wouldn't we?
| simianwords wrote:
| Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to
| run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs
| wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a
| "fantasy" or not?
| mbesto wrote:
| No but you're claiming "if they all are investing X
| amount then these bets obviously must pan out". If you
| follow that rationale then it means that all bets that
| these company's make in the same space must all pan out.
| So if they don't all pan out then the fact that they're
| all making bets isn't a sound rationale for it being
| true.
|
| As others have pointed out, investors notoriously have
| FOMO, so rationale actors (CEOs of big tech) naturally
| are incentivized to make bets and claims that they are
| betting on things that the market believes to be true
| regardless if they are so as to appease shareholders.
| simianwords wrote:
| No, i don't claim that all bets must pan out - simply
| that most bets are made intelligently with serious
| intent.
|
| that's the way i see this bet as well.
|
| your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect -
| its the musical chairs theory of markets.
| lossolo wrote:
| Because it will inflate their stock valuations? It's like
| with fusion energy or going to Mars etc., constantly X
| years away and currently economically unfeasible.
| simianwords wrote:
| why do you think their stock will inflate?
| lossolo wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're joking, but "AI datacenter in
| space" is the kind of phrase that attracts investors,
| that's straight from Musk's playbook for keeping the
| stock trading at ridiculous P/Es, especially now that he
| is planning SpaceX IPO.
| simianwords wrote:
| why does it attract investors if it is so obvious that it
| will fail?
|
| it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to
| assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures
| investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a
| good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only
| that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said
| money into this venture that obviously won't work. why
| does he waste his time into a venture that obviously
| won't work? who knows
| lossolo wrote:
| You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who
| blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was
| creating a new political party in the US, how's that
| going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing
| people on Mars in 2018? It's 2026. How is boring company
| going? etc. I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote
| and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works,
| and the physics is simple here: unless you change the
| physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is
| 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.
| simianwords wrote:
| So you have no clue why he's doing it? He's putting money
| in a thing that will obviously fail.
|
| Either you are way way smarter than him, or he's doing
| this for some other ulterior motive.
| lossolo wrote:
| You didn't answer my questions. How is The Boring company
| going? And in this context, you can also ask: "Is he
| putting money into something that will obviously fail?"
|
| Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter
| than him" there nine years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020
| simianwords wrote:
| Here Bezos, sundar, Jensen all are invested.
|
| On boring: it's easy to say in hindsight.
| lossolo wrote:
| You know why I mentioned hydrogen energy earlier? There
| was a Financial Times article last month titled "Hydrogen
| dreams meet reality as oil and gas groups abandon
| projects", which notes that "Almost 60 major low carbon
| hydrogen projects--including ones backed by BP and
| ExxonMobil--have been cancelled" because they weren't
| economically feasible. Space data centers are in the same
| place today. It's physics. And none of the people you
| mentioned have invested in this. They may be interested
| and might research the topic, but that's not the same
| thing. I've yet to see any plan that explains how they'll
| replace failed hardware and manage heat while keeping the
| whole thing economically feasible.
| simianwords wrote:
| ok so you are smarter than all of them? and if they had
| put you in charge instead of the phd's, they might have
| been better off?
| lossolo wrote:
| You're using an uninteresting appeal to authority
| argument again.
|
| So let's talk physics. Are you familiar with the
| radiative heat-balance problem? You can use the Stefan-
| Boltzmann law to calculate how many radiators you'd need.
|
| Required area: A = P / (eps * sigma * eta * (Tr^4 -
| Tsink^4))
|
| Where:
|
| A = radiator area [m^2]
|
| P = waste heat to dump [W]
|
| eps = emissivity (0..1)
|
| sigma = 5.670374419e-8 W/m^2/K^4
|
| eta = non ideal factor for view/blockage/etc (0..1)
|
| Tr = radiator temperature [K]
|
| Tsink = effective sink temperature [K] (deep space ~3 K,
| ~0 for Tr sizing)
|
| Assuming best conditions so deep space, eps~0.9, eta~1:
|
| At Tr=300K: ~413 W/m^2
|
| At Tr=350K: ~766 W/m^2
|
| At Tr=400K: ~1307 W/m^2
|
| So for 10 MW at 350K (basically around 77degC): A ~ 1e7 /
| 766 [?] 13,006 m^2 (best case).
|
| And even in the best case scenario it's only 10 MW and
| we're not counting radiation from the sun or IR from the
| moon/earth etc. so in real life, it will be even higher.
|
| You can build 10 MW nuclear power plant (microreactor)
| with the datacenter included on Earth for the same price.
|
| Show me your numbers or lay out a plan for how to make it
| economically feasible in space.
| simianwords wrote:
| you are saying you can stop an entire division in google,
| nvidia, blue origin with this bit of theory?
|
| like all the employees had to do with read this and be
| like: wow i never saw it that way.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are
| not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech.
| Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any
| money.
|
| Investors, both commercial and individual, often have
| more money than sense.
| simianwords wrote:
| Do you think investors as a large group make enormous
| amounts of money on average?
| gosub100 wrote:
| I didn't say they make it. They have it, like an older
| person who grew their portfolio over time. They are an
| example of someone who invests in AI without knowing
| anything about what it is.
| simianwords wrote:
| its incorrect - investors and wall street in general
| _makes_ money on average.
| tokai wrote:
| Well it made you invest in them.
| simianwords wrote:
| Yes because as I said I believe it will work out, so does
| Google, SpaceX, Blue Origin.
| mbesto wrote:
| Kodak made a crypto coin. Where did that end up?
| simianwords wrote:
| > Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many
| they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if
| this is a "fantasy" or not?
| snarf21 wrote:
| Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big
| payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX?
| Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it.
|
| The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same
| as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in
| the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's
| wealth.
|
| Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: -
| demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA
| to New York by the end of 2017 - "autonomous ride hailing
| in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of
| the year" - "thousands" of Optimus humanoid robots
| working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025." - Tesla
| semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017,
| and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later
| they have received half of them.)
| simianwords wrote:
| I have put as much money as I believe in it (risk
| adjusted). And same goes for Google, Spacex, Blue Origin
| and other companies.
|
| This trope
|
| > It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and
| increase Musk's wealth.
|
| Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive
| interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an
| amazing reputation getting things done and making things
| that people like. Whether you like him as a person or
| not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason
| enough to believe him now.
| tokai wrote:
| >Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and
| making things that people like
|
| Are you trolling?
| simianwords wrote:
| Almost everyone in the industry thinks this way.
| sneak wrote:
| SpaceX and Starlink are privately held.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The demand for allocation in any of SpaceX private
| funding raises is practically unlimited. It's just not
| something you _can_ put your money in.
| brightball wrote:
| The thing about Elon is that he's got more than enough
| credibility with betting on big crazy ideas that he's one
| of a few people that you have to take seriously.
|
| Tesla from LA to NY -
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-
| itself-...
|
| Thousand of Optimus Robots...just announced closing a
| factory to have them focus on robot production -
| https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla-ending-model-s-x-
| produ...
|
| SpaceX rewriting the entire economic formula for space
| launches, accounting for almost 90% of all launches
| globally last year, becoming a critical piece of the
| Department of Defense while also launching Starlink
| globally.
|
| Neuralink let's people control computers with their
| brain, even playing video games. They're working on an
| implant to cure blindness right now.
|
| https://neuralink.com/trials/visual-prosthesis/
|
| I get that the man is politically unpopular in some
| circles, but it's really difficult to bet against him at
| this point. So far, the biggest criticism has been that
| it took a little longer than he initially said to
| deliver...but he did deliver.
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| Not even a little; doesn't pass napkin math. It doesn't solve
| any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive
| radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and
| enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even
| possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their
| money; the product is the funding round.
| codethief wrote:
| I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders
| of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop
| quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the
| other issue that information processing is an inherently
| dissipative process because entropy etc.)
| cguess wrote:
| How would electrical resistance drop in space? If you're
| thinking "because it's cold" that's actually the biggest
| issue. The vacuum means you can't dispose of heat easily,
| so you need _giant_ radiators, which are expensive,
| heavy, etc.
| fouc wrote:
| there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway
| satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close
| enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably
| on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth.
|
| the compute is used for training, not inference. the
| redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them
| die, it is no big deal.
|
| and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they
| avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| It sounds like you're describing Google's proposal, which
| I believe is at least feasible (though likely uneconomic)
| unlike, say, Starcloud's. I don't think you are correct
| about the orbit, though; Google's proposal lists the
| satellites at 650 km, which would give them approximately
| 20 years in orbit without boosts. They list estimated
| life at 5 years given radiation concerns, so they almost
| certainly would purposely deorbit them earlier.
| jsight wrote:
| I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no.
| However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based
| internet system would be both expensive and impractical for
| bandwidth and latency.
|
| Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to
| their approach to optimize launch costs.
|
| It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental
| advancement that would make this less impractical than it
| sounds. I'm still really skeptical.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a container ship, convert it to a
| data center and connect it to a bunch of floating panels?
| gman2093 wrote:
| Most systems use fresh water for cooling. Salt water can
| corrode pipes and deposit sediment, but maybe there's a way
| to use ocean water efficiently.
|
| They also need to be powered and connected to a network, but
| that seems like an easier problem.
| andruby wrote:
| the internal loop can be fresh water which heat exchanges
| with the ocean water
| sailfast wrote:
| I wouldn't overthink the SpaceX / xAI thing. Seems to me it's a
| pure financing play to blend two companies owned by the same
| guy that might look meh on their own to the market but have a
| compelling narrative about "future growth" together.
|
| All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue
| to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a
| bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.
| simianwords wrote:
| what about Google? It's always the same tired thought ending
| cliches - companies with "bad" people do obviously "bad"
| thing to convince idiotic shareholders and prop up the
| bubble.
|
| i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.
|
| Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this.
| Even China is.
|
| What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would
| they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of
| you that it is not going to work?
| DalasNoin wrote:
| Space doesn't seem like a good place to build datacenters at
| all. Cooling is going to be an enormous issue, how do you
| disperse of heat in a vaccuum? Radiators are very ineffective
| for cooling.
| whizzter wrote:
| Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is
| movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of
| particles, so it's by definition cold.
|
| Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation
| convertible to electricity should enable that.
|
| Both parts are documented about ISS
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter.
| ..
| delecti wrote:
| Space is indeed very cold, but it does not cool you off
| very quickly. The lack of particles means it's harder to
| get heat away from yourself. Essentially all of the energy
| produced via solar panels would be converted to heat by the
| computers.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| It's cold in a sense that is not very relevant. Your
| tumbler has a vaccuum layer because vaccuum does not
| transport or absorb any heat. you need those atoms to carry
| away heat.
| tzs wrote:
| > Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat
| is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of
| particles, so it's by definition cold.
|
| That absence of particles also means it is a nearly perfect
| insulator, with almost no heat transferred from the station
| to space by contact with space. No convection either.
|
| That leaves cooling by thermal radiation, which is not a
| very good method.
| phkahler wrote:
| There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do
| these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee
| it's not to run LLMs.
| 542458 wrote:
| Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed
| throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to
| kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as
| many subsidies as possible.
| brandonb wrote:
| NASA got its support in much the same way during the space
| race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get
| political support.
| janice1999 wrote:
| Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is
| complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The
| F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in
| its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high
| paying, often unionised jobs.
| briffle wrote:
| I hear that argument, but a relative has been an
| elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the
| original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the
| business, and his single biggest client is still the
| facebook datacenter.
|
| Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
| andruby wrote:
| Should still be orders different from a the continuous
| labor intensive manufacturing of F35's
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building
| data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren't competing
| against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a
| zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie 'manufacturing hubs'.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's still contract work. When it's over so is your
| paycheck.
| almosthere wrote:
| Construction is one of the jobs that's booming
| nationwide.
| phil21 wrote:
| For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never
| over. Once you are done with one bit of work something
| else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are
| breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS,
| generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and
| a replacement cycle.
|
| It's effectively a full time job for an electrician crew
| or three.
|
| Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job
| does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| How big is the business?
| ecshafer wrote:
| In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge
| boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys
| there, which yeah thats small. But you also have
| facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this
| with the stimulus to the local economy through construction
| its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but
| there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart.
| These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as
| being a big benefit.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a
| smaller community can also help through the increased tax
| revenue the town/county gets.
|
| Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the
| datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I
| have to imagine that the local county is going to net
| some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used
| to then support the town.
|
| There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on
| being developed. Even if that is done in financial
| isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new
| building designed for tech is being built. Should the
| datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable
| building/development that has some value.
| chneu wrote:
| Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often
| get saddled with higher utility costs, among other
| things.
|
| When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data
| centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get
| renewed.
|
| Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city
| promised some land just outside of the boundary would
| stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on
| that already. The utility rates have also doubled in
| recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are
| destroyed from construction which damages cars, further
| increasing the burden on everyone else.
| its_ethan wrote:
| Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up
| camp and leave, that's still developed property that has
| potential to be more useful than it had been.
|
| And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can
| lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that
| land employed people, and that is a positive thing for
| construction workers and their families (more than just
| financially).
|
| Just because you can point at negative consequences
| doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's
| rarely black and white as to the net effects of things
| like this. You could/should even be considering what
| doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a
| city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local
| community that might otherwise be left behind, completely
| out of the picture. There's another world where a small
| town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or
| the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a
| small blip in a story about how small towns in this
| country have decayed as a result of being passed by
| during the current tech "boom".
|
| It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just
| transport a datacenter to another state, or even county.
| You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're
| trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-
| tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".
|
| At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the
| local government to make sure that the deal is a net
| benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to
| expect lol
| janice1999 wrote:
| "We're going to have supervision," Oracle founder Larry Ellison
| said. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all
| times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem
| and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on
| their best behavior because we are constantly recording and
| reporting everything that's going on."
| sailfast wrote:
| They don't, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.
| drunner wrote:
| The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon.
| They want access to Lake Michigan.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have
| something to say about this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
| its_ethan wrote:
| > Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in
| Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject
| to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or
| increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.
|
| I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt
| around this compact?
|
| Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on
| using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a
| framework for how the states are to manage it. It is
| entirely believable to me that this compact would actually
| support water being used for developing tech in the
| surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
| coredog64 wrote:
| I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-
| feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping
| your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water
| from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water
| evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is
| the percentage increase when used for cooling?
| beart wrote:
| Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not
| seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a
| "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.
| shagie wrote:
| It's which side of the drainage basin is the water moved
| to? When the water is flushed back into the system, does
| it drain back into the Great Lakes? or down to the Gulf
| of Mexico?
|
| On the southern shore of Lake Michigan, that "few miles"
| changes the watershed that its part of.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Basin (
| https://www.erbff.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/10/10.8.25-Gre... for a high
| resolution map)
|
| As for diversions that go to evaporative cooling, that's
| a big question for the data center itself and there are
| many designs. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-
| science/data-center-cooli... has some cutting edge
| designs, but they're more expensive to use for pumping
| waste heat elsewhere.
|
| Sometimes you get data centers that look like
| https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-
| dalles... ... and that's not a little bit of water there.
|
| While the Great Lakes are coming off of wet years ( https
| ://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/waterleveldata/..
| . ) that shouldn't be used as long term prediction of
| what will be available in another 10 years lest it
| becomes another Colorado river problem. Currently, the
| water levels for Lake Michigan are lower than average and
| not predicted to return to average in the model range. ht
| tps://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/mboglwl/MBOGLW
| L... . You'll note that this isn't at the minimums from
| the 1960s... and the Great Lakes Compact was signed in
| 2008.
|
| You can search the database for the authorized diversions
| of the water.
| https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-
| information/ba...
|
| For example, Nine Mile Point -
| https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-
| information/ba...
| sensanaty wrote:
| But where do we stop with all of this endless expansion?
| Do the great lakes have to go through an Aral Sea type of
| situation before we decide it's time to stop? It's not
| like these AI ghouls are shy about wanting infinite
| expansion and an ever-growing number of data centers to
| feed their word generators, do we really think that if we
| just let them have the water now they're not going to
| abuse that and that they won't start draining the lakes
| for all the water they can manage? I'm not so optimistic,
| myself.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I don't recall the exact specifics, but I do remember a
| while ago there was some outrage that Nestle was bottling
| some really large sounding amount of water (think
| ~millions of gallons a day?) from a Great Lake. The math
| behind how much was being used as a % of lake volume was
| negligible (it would take ~3,500,000 years to "drain"
| Michigan at that rate).
|
| In my mind this is partly due to people not understanding
| large numbers, and also not understanding just how much
| water is actually in the Great Lakes. It's a huge amount
| - Lake Michigan has 1,288,000,000,000,000 gallons in it.
| _Every human on earth_ could use close to 10gal of water
| per day for the next 50 years before Lake Michigan would
| be "dry", assuming it was never replenished. And that's
| just Lake Michigan. (Obviously environmental systems are
| more complicated than the simple division I did, and
| individual water usage isn't simply 10gal a day - it's
| just to demonstrate a point).
|
| Now, someone else pointed out that the tragedy of the
| commons is a sort of death by a thousand cuts. And if
| anyone who shows up is allowed to draw millions of
| gallons a day, that can add up and certainly have
| negative effects. It's just important to actually
| understand the scale of the numbers involved, and to not
| let legitimate environmental concerns be cross-
| contaminated with just anti-tech-of-the-year sentiment,
| or political motivations, or whatever else might cloud
| the waters (pun unintended).
| blastro wrote:
| let's hope this holds, i have no reason to expect that in
| 2026
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| That only means they have to be built in counties which are
| part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return
| the water back to be net-neutral and comply with
| environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy
| manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this
| article calls out is along a fresh water source and does
| not require Lake Michigan water.
|
| The other locations like Oracle's dc in Port Washington or
| MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are
| within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike
| Foxconn are all 'closed-loop' which of course isn't
| entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon's
| 7mil gal/day nonsense.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of
| data centers be in Northern Virginia.
|
| My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all
| over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes
| running in a facility down the street. That sort of
| construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went
| to "the cloud".
| Aurornis wrote:
| Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing.
|
| Putting them all in one or two places isn't good for
| reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit
| from having them distributed.
|
| Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It's a good thing when
| your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers
| and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
|
| Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a
| server in a different country? It's not fun. The speed of light
| limits round trip times.
|
| > I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
|
| Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
| cobolcomesback wrote:
| It's to run LLMs.
|
| In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers
| were geographically located. They needed to be in the same
| general location as population centers for latency reasons, and
| they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs
| (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and
| failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there's only
| a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon,
| Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs.
| Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
|
| Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your
| data centers, you want them near your already existing data
| centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can't expand us-
| east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because
| it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
|
| Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but
| latency and failover connectivity doesn't really matter (the
| extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is
| dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters
| even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers
| to be placed in geographic places they couldn't be before, and
| now the big priority's just open land, cheap power, and water.
| leptons wrote:
| >Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
|
| Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon
| billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still
| managing to lose all that money?
|
| Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the
| price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents
| who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI"
| companies won't care, they'll just do another round of
| funding.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-
| costs-a...
| lapcat wrote:
| Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not
| exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to
| compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have
| local, state, and even national governments competing among
| themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election
| campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of
| competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's
| certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in
| various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy
| corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop
| electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political
| system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the
| system practically requires financial corruption. The political
| duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their
| message without money, which is why alternative parties are
| trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of
| admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in
| this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate
| invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because
| they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the
| state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two
| years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the
| local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's
| no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal
| a given fact to the local government, then the local government
| has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument,
| they get to know the thing they want to know without having to
| go pass a law.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Ftfa " The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for
| typical development proposals in the planning stages..."
|
| Sounds like it's not something new or reserved for data enter
| projects only but I agree it sure seems a shady practice.
| dguest wrote:
| I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.
|
| I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the
| article:
|
| > If I'm a company considering making strategic investments... I
| don't want my competition to know where I'm going, what I'm
| doing, what pace I'm doing it at... You want to make sure
| everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of
| information is put into the public realm.
|
| I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will
| outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?
|
| Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can
| see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're
| trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up
| with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d
| chess game, better that you don't know".
| infecto wrote:
| I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience,
| it's not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a
| manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least
| initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.
|
| There is a component of not wanting the competition know
| exactly what your doing but also it's usually better for most
| parties including the constituents to not know about it until
| it's at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it's
| not even worth talking about with the public until it's even a
| viable project.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I can't give you a number, but I work in the space and it is
| very common. It's not just industrial sites; it can just be a
| new bank headquarters.
| a2128 wrote:
| This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car
| emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might
| discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC
| certification because competitors might glean information out
| of a device's radio characteristics?
|
| The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a
| right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery
| stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal
| enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
| bparsons wrote:
| Don't give them any ideas
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions
| numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame
| and remove from the organization... VW:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| It's definitely a result of the money at play, which is
| unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.
|
| But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power
| imbalances, and money is of course power.
|
| Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now
| though, especially when it comes to the president's biggest
| donors and the vice president's handlers.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the building of the American Railroads were the largest
| capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was
| in the center of that, too
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Ah my bad. But also, if we're comparing buildout of
| infrastructure to the construction of the American
| Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking
| and general immoral and unethical behavior...
|
| Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the
| "return to the gilded age" debates.
|
| Edit: you're speaking kind of authoritatively on the
| subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble
| is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the
| railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
| hobs wrote:
| Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly
| value the work
|
| By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of
| railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-
| states-histor...
|
| Depend on you value land mileage and work this could
| easily be north of 1T modern dollars.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting
| subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by
| width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that
| makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a
| parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x
| for some x given inflation.
|
| But railroads kind of fail with this because you might
| have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at
| $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact
| piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is
| super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.
|
| Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth
| less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square
| foot, especially if it's rocky or unstable etc.
|
| Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has
| its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any
| particular segment (especially as it allows you to build
| a railroad hah).
|
| Anyway, suffice to say, I don't think "land value
| underneath railroads from the 18th century" is something
| that's easily estimated.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad
| buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than
| AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of
| magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.
|
| > AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022.
| A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on
| information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39%
| annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard
| economist Jason Furman commented that investment in
| information processing equipment & software is equivalent
| to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP
| growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these
| categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual
| rate in the first half.
|
| https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-
| economy?utm_s...
| infecto wrote:
| What is always left unclear in these anti data center
| articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It's not
| out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA
| until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not
| mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions
| before ground breaks.
| cmxch wrote:
| What kind of say do the residents have when it's nearly a
| done deal?
|
| Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto,
| they're just speaking into the void as far as the company
| is concerned.
| infecto wrote:
| Typically constituents don't have any ability to veto. I
| imagine there are some cases in CA, thinking of that
| amusing article about an ice cream shop getting blocked
| by another ice cream shop.
|
| It's usually an indirect vote with your voice. To be
| frank, people don't have that much of a role in what
| business gets built if it aligns with the states economic
| goals and zoning is not being critically changed.
|
| I think the bigger discussion is if resources are going
| to be constrained can we make sure the use is being
| properly charged for resource buildout. It's the same
| problem with building sports arenas or sweetheart tax
| deals for manufacturing plants, they often don't pan out.
| state_less wrote:
| Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity
| to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good
| outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the
| community would like to weigh in on whether they want a
| data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do,
| they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom
| deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech
| and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode,
| sponging off the small guy at this stage.
| infecto wrote:
| You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal
| practice in economic development, check off boxes until
| announcing to the public. The public rarely has much
| power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the
| current evil entity.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions
| astray here. The actual decision at question here is
| whether the local government provides the necessary
| approvals for a company to build what they want on their
| private property.
|
| It's good and proper for the government to consider the
| impacts on a local community before approving a big
| construction project. That process will need to involve
| some amount of open community consultation, and
| reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to
| start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the
| end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence
| phase but not once the formal approval process begins;
| that seems fine.
|
| It's not good and improper for the government to
| selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored
| industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone
| seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.
| webstrand wrote:
| Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If
| the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors,
| either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility
| infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to
| have some insight and input, same as they have input into
| whether a high density hog farm can open right on the
| border of the community.
|
| Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethical
| issue. I agree its not proper for permits to be withheld
| on purely ethical grounds, laws should be passed instead.
| But there are a lot of side-effects to having a
| datacenter near your property that are entirely concrete
| issues.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any
| reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input
| they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the
| Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the
| scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get
| the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided
| they didn't want it.
| sylos wrote:
| Why shouldn't permits be withheld on ethical grounds?
| Isn't that just giving permission for companies to be
| unethical and get away with it?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical
| behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally
| applicable law that provides for such penalties.
| Withholding permission to do random things based on ad
| hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for
| corruption.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I agree with you. this should be handled by the
| legislative process. but we should also agree that secret
| deals announced as a fiat acompli are pretty fertile
| ground for corruption also
| ajam1507 wrote:
| Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur.
| You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to
| think that the laws on the books can cover every
| situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and
| cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment
| governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh
| the benefits of individual government actors having
| arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen
| clearly on the federal level this past year, once you
| create that discretion, the common way for corporate
| executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and
| deserve favorable treatment is not good behavior but open
| bribery of public officials.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > the community would like to weigh in on whether they
| want a data center
|
| This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop
| thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use
| and not that kind, then they need to _write that down_ in
| a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all
| discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can 't
| build anything.
| state_less wrote:
| I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center
| build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it
| to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it,
| make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the
| residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power
| bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits,
| noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These
| massive data centers are a new kind of business that most
| communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt
| they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the
| states are starting to add some more rules about
| transparency, which seems like a step in the right
| direction for making better deals for all involved.
| 5upplied_demand wrote:
| The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.
|
| > Wisconsin has now joined several states with
| legislative proposals to make the process more
| transparent.
|
| But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the
| impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for
| citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal.
| Partially because so many of the deals were done under
| cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more
| assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any
| development. The way these companies act will only
| increase NIMBYism.
|
| > Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why
| Americans can't build anything.
|
| Trusting large corporations to provide a full and
| accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| > If a place wants this kind of land use and not that
| kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so
| everyone knows the rules.
|
| Ironically this is a recipe for how you get nothing
| built. Zoning laws are much more potent than people
| showing up at city council meetings.
| tzs wrote:
| > Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because
| Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results?
| Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors
| might glean information out of a device's radio
| characteristics?
|
| In the US neither of those are generally made public per se.
| They are made public when the thing actually passes testing
| or certification.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > I don't want my competition to know where I'm going, what I'm
| doing, what pace I'm doing it at
|
| This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the
| water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY
| issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used
| in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a
| town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo
| tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing
| agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and
| power needs of everything in Harwood.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a
| race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to
| corporations?
| Supermancho wrote:
| Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales,
| looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing
| Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to
| take a payout. I think the company predation was
| transparent.
| sneak wrote:
| How is that predation if the people in that city
| democratically elected the mayor who made that choice?
| Isn't that representative democracy decisionmaking
| working as intended?
| kakacik wrote:
| For such a massive long term impact, people should vote
| directly. That's ideal, and its pretty realistic ideal
| especially with 800 votes which are trivial to count.
|
| If course its not ideal for the company investing. Then
| the question becomes if rights/wishes of people are above
| of those of companies. Often, in Europe they are not, and
| often in US they are, exceptions notwithstanding.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > How is that predation if the people in that city
| democratically elected the mayor who made that choice?
|
| Find a small town politician, bribe them. Corruption pure
| and simple with no chance for accountability. The
| economically strong predate on the economically weak.
| yccs27 wrote:
| It's preying on the city's desperation to get a cash
| payout, to get space and utilities worth much more.
| Facebook abuses its market power to pit city governments
| against each other, while the cities don't have many
| alternatives.
| sneak wrote:
| Does the mayor sell land or electricity now? That's not
| how one gets space or utilities.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic
| abuse in siting movies and TV
| vasco wrote:
| Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the
| community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe
| someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their
| location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war
| and they'd get more money.
|
| So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the
| municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher
| demand.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept
| secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.
| emsign wrote:
| Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground
| water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built
| in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation,
| investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption.
| The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people
| are pissed because of:
|
| * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long
| distances making people sick
|
| * power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of
| residentials
|
| * rising electricity bills
|
| * rising water bills
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > use too much ground water
|
| Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land
| for anything involving agriculture, for example.
|
| The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently
| invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction.
| Cui bono?
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand
| for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need
| food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's
| clothes off.
|
| These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I
| don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful
| here.
| gosub100 wrote:
| "Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too
| much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in
| particular struggle with their water supply and should not
| be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too
| lazy to think.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great
| Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.
| bargove wrote:
| Ummm, I live in Wisconsin (since 1996), and that isn't
| how that works at ALL.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Can you make more substantive comments besides saying
| "wrong!" ? I don't disagree with your claim but it's
| extremely low effort and adds nothing to the
| conversation.
| Throaway1982 wrote:
| Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre
| takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse
| but no one is saying they want that either.
| triceratops wrote:
| Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It
| loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use
| closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose
| it.
| coryrc wrote:
| They use evaporative cooling towers because you need far
| fewer of them. The evaporating water can be separate from
| the main cooling loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool
| ing_tower#Heat_transfer_me...
| emsign wrote:
| A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system
| then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe
| the public.
| triceratops wrote:
| Charge them more for water and electricity until they're
| using the amount of water you think is right.
|
| The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting
| into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.
| emsign wrote:
| I'd rather have something to eat or take a shower at home
| than talk to an LLM.
| bargove wrote:
| Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of
| new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry...
| (hurting the people directly)
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a
| datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid
| production in the area. It has drastically increased our
| electricity prices where I live.
| phil21 wrote:
| Not building energy production and distribution for the
| past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to
| increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run
| out of the previous generation's infrastructure investments
| and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real
| capital investment.
|
| Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit.
| This was always coming for us.
|
| So long as they are paying market rates like any other
| power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If
| they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from
| regulatory rates then there would be a problem.
|
| The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen
| 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical
| need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.
|
| If we can't figure out as a society how to come out ahead
| with a much more robust electric grid after this giant
| investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational
| scale.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of
| imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA
| before a vote:
|
| - Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional
| activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring
| locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and
| misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid
| activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some
| paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal
| obstacles
|
| We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it's obnoxious
| progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who
| live in some toxic coastal city who don't want it in your own
| back yard a thousand miles away.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment.
| After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it.
| Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers
| (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that
| are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these
| data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're
| blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Larry Fink is personally responsible for more insane
| progressive policies and pogroms in publicly traded
| companies than any other single individual. Historically,
| maybe Lenin was worse. Brendan Eich, father of JavaScript,
| was excommunicated from Mozilla for having private opinions
| not in line with the progressive ersatz religion. You're
| not being serious here.
|
| There is nothing grass roots about "AI will cause drought
| and famine" nonsense coming from the infotainment content
| mills. I don't blame anyone for keeping their work out of
| the hostile press.
| miki123211 wrote:
| There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."
|
| The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it
| comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes
| some negative externalities for the people living close to it,
| so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they
| want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to
| delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level
| than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X
| never gets build.
|
| Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets
| build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should
| it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its
| services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly
| through the elected representatives)? I think those are the
| right questions to ask here.
| e40 wrote:
| The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or
| anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and
| vast amounts of open spaces.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long
| commute.
|
| Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners
| require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take
| longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less
| qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
| duped wrote:
| Pay them more then
| bluedino wrote:
| Very few people work in datacenters
| sylos wrote:
| so datacenters should be allowed to come into
| communities, consume their resources and barely hire the
| local populace?
| e40 wrote:
| What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far
| enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters
| of homes. It's absolutely insane.
|
| EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE
|
| Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.
| sokka_h2otribe wrote:
| Arguably, an 800 person town is likely quite far from most.
| dguest wrote:
| I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the
| anticommons" [1].
|
| Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is
| a complicated question. But there are other options to
| keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we
| have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the
| local community transparently.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
| keybored wrote:
| "Tragedy of the commons" is suffering from people overusing
| it.
| duped wrote:
| > Everybody wants X to exist
|
| Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely
| tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight
| path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any
| compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities
| are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it
| shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one
| to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
| mkarrmann wrote:
| Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to
| outbid.
|
| Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a
| difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem
| completely plausible.
| topaz0 wrote:
| In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the
| community -- if that location is what's scarce then they
| should be demanding a better deal.
| PTOB wrote:
| ^ This right here.
| duped wrote:
| > Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY
|
| Literally every data center project that gets announced near me
| gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple
| series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.
|
| It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent
| tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred
| is deeper than that.
|
| The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business
| is fundamentally bad."
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their
| electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No,
| your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up
| because you used way more electricity, probably because it's
| been ass-freezingly cold.
| duped wrote:
| My rate has been consistently 40-60% higher over the last
| year independent of weather
| wat10000 wrote:
| Your rate, or your bill? I'm seeing people complain about
| their bills. None of them ever come back and discuss how
| much of the change was due to changes in their rate
| versus changes in their usage.
| bluedino wrote:
| They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of
| social media.
|
| Ironic.
| eigencoder wrote:
| Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed
| in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city
| there and he told me about how the development went down.
|
| When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build
| a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's
| reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact
| same project to the city council, while keeping their name
| secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only
| considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for
| the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially
| the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who
| rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of
| deal a city should take."
|
| I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own
| reputations.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations
| instead.
| macintux wrote:
| > Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word
|
| > It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt
|
| > And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal
| lagniappe wrote:
| They say trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback
| bell-cot wrote:
| "Doing that would fail to align with the company's current
| priorities. And by the way - you're fired." -Catbert
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| it's worrying that they would consider something without
| knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.
| buttercraft wrote:
| I'm not sure. Cities are supposed to approve or deny
| applications based on whether they comply with zoning,
| codes, parking, water availability etc. They can't deny
| based on who or what the business is alone. A city near me
| is dealing with a lawsuit for exactly that.
|
| It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > They can't deny based on who or what the business is
| alone
|
| They absolutely can and do this. Ask to put an adult
| entertainment store next to a school/church. Ask to put a
| liquor store next to a school/church. The city will say
| no.
| buttercraft wrote:
| Right, because zoning and state laws forbid those things.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| That's probably a zoning issue, though..
| mbreese wrote:
| Cities can largely do what they want. They can deny
| applications for whatever reason they want. Citizen
| concerns are very important here (they need to keep
| voters happy to keep their jobs). But their main mandate
| is to protect the public good. If a project isn't in the
| interest of their community, they ca deny it.
|
| Whether or not it's legal is another question. And NIMBY
| and... and... there are lots of potential concerns. But
| this article is about Wisconsin, where the question is
| really what are we going to do with this land and how are
| going to power it.
|
| Your post mentions a lawsuit near you. This is a feature,
| not a bug. Even if the city is unlawfully denying an
| application, the denial still has the desired effect -- a
| de facto denial for the length of time it takes to
| resolve in the courts. By dragging out the time for a
| lawsuit to be resolved, the city hopes that the developer
| will just go away and find someplace else.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I'm not sure how I feel about this.
|
| I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional
| societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and
| hiding critical information.
|
| If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even
| when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as
| a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so
| hated.
|
| Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as
| usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg -
| You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful
| explosion because they ignored all the feedback.
|
| ---
|
| Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for
| good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat
| reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of
| forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated
| alternatives?
|
| If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses
| his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to
| engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good,
| is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional
| societies,
|
| See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential
| election. Reputations were on full display.
| nativeit wrote:
| Doesn't that further defeat the argument for secrecy
| here?
| josefresco wrote:
| I was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the
| events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a
| Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws
| after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone
| was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply
| changed their minds/laws.
|
| https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-
| county-...
|
| > In 2016, West Jordan City sought to land a Facebook data
| center by offering large tax incentives to the social media
| giant. That deal ultimately fell through amid opposition by
| Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and a vote of conditional
| support by the Utah Board of Education that sought to cap the
| company's tax benefits.
|
| > That project went to New Mexico, which was offering even
| richer incentives.
|
| > Three months after the Utah negotiations ended, state
| lawmakers voted in a special session to approve a sales tax
| exemption for data centers. The move was seen by many as
| another attempt to woo Facebook to the Beehive State.
|
| So basically they first said "No", lost the bid, had FOMO so
| they passed new laws to attract this business.
|
| >Asked about the identity of the company, Foxley said only
| that it is "a major technology company that wants to bring a
| data center to Utah."
|
| >And that vision could soon be a reality, after members of
| the Utah County Commission voted Tuesday to approve roughly
| $150 million in property tax incentives to lure an as-yet-
| unnamed company -- that sounds an awful lot like Facebook --
| to the southern end of Pony Express Parkway.
|
| Seems like a pretty open and obvious secret.
| eigencoder wrote:
| I admit I may be missing broader context about the state,
| this was specifically from someone working for Eagle
| Mountain city planning. But the article you've cited is
| later in the process than what I'm talking about.
| analog31 wrote:
| A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the
| potential abuse of eminent domain.
|
| When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for
| large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were
| given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They
| also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land
| from owners who didn't want to sell it.
|
| A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the
| Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and
| the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being
| protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other
| political issues.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking
| price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a
| bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property
| owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.
| tokai wrote:
| But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to
| support it.
| dguest wrote:
| I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".
|
| If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in
| Florida I think most people would sell them for market price.
| But if they all know that their _specific_ house is an
| essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you 're liable
| to have holdouts.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > you're liable to have holdouts
|
| That's what happened after his shell companies were
| exposed.
| packetlost wrote:
| This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live
| and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly
| justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback
| in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local
| subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city
| counsel meetings. People _do not_ want these datacenters here.
|
| I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as
| this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.
| upboundspiral wrote:
| What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have
| been in huge trouble for decades.
|
| They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc
| all had factories there. The problem is that these companies
| effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then
| they left.
|
| Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that
| built our economy so the landlords in power could have even
| more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did
| however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.
|
| The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich
| states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of
| power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and
| play city governments against each other with impunity.
|
| The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they
| present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them
| even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There
| doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city
| could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their
| utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights"
| and "justice" have exited the lexicon.
| reactordev wrote:
| Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by
| data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and
| pay 4x electric bill rates.
|
| https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-
| industry...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri.
| ..
|
| https://archive.ph/9rY9Z
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter
| build out hand over fist isn't really in the midwest where
| one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the
| heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern
| virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse
| town.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were
| everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have
| guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely
| populated part of the country...
| wat10000 wrote:
| Yep, Northern Virginia gets you close to the BosWash
| megalopolis and pretty close to better than half of the
| US population. It also gives you access to a highly
| educated workforce and pretty much no natural disasters
| of note.
|
| There's also network (pun intended) effects. Northern
| Virginia has been a major internet hub for a long time,
| with the first non-government peering point and a bunch
| of telecom companies, including AOL.
|
| The data center land isn't that expensive anyway.
| Northern Virginia can be tremendously expensive, but the
| data centers are built out in the relative sticks. I'm
| sure the land would be cheaper in Wyoming, but it's cheap
| enough.
| ahi wrote:
| Considering the capital costs in fitting out these
| datacenters, the land being 10x more expensive doesn't move
| the needle much on total cost.
| michaelt wrote:
| Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data
| centres make a lot more money per square foot than things
| like farming, after all.
|
| You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly.
| And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local
| suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs
| of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires,
| flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax
| you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very
| few people.
| jadbox wrote:
| Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also
| culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If
| GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck
| serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.
| rvba wrote:
| They dont have any negotiating power -> it is a race to the
| bottom
| expedition32 wrote:
| Unfortunately for the rust belt states data centers don't
| bring in a lot of jobs.
|
| No well educated highly paid person wants to live in the
| middle of nowhere. Wisconsin will never be Seattle, Boston or
| NYC.
| scoofy wrote:
| I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It's easy
| to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The _why_ is
| the American development pattern that creates suburbia that
| can't generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.
|
| That's the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly
| expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in
| large part, fix the problem.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities
| benefitted from being in the right place at the right time
| (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades,
| but post-globalization they are just one of infinity
| undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and
| power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to
| social networks and institutions).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you
| don't know".
|
| This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price
| difference between the the people pricing it and what the
| benefit is to the people buying it.
|
| If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that
| underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I'm going to
| offer you whatever you think you're value of your land is worth
| without telling you that there's a gold mind underneath it so
| that I can exploit the difference in information.
|
| That's the entire concept behind modern economic theory,
| specifically trade arbitrage. That's precisely what it is and
| that's exactly the point from Meta.
| tptacek wrote:
| Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's
| an exemption in many state FOIA laws.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I'm having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in
| this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12
| football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could
| believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12
| football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don't know
| if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data
| center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than
| they really are.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude
| smaller than 500+ acres.
| bluedino wrote:
| For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3
| acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about
| 1-3/4 acres
| rkomorn wrote:
| Not sure if serious because you're converting from football
| fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-
| Americans generally don't use.
| tzs wrote:
| Acres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for
| measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents
| for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and
| documents will use acres outside of legal documents.
|
| India has has a substantial number of acre users.
| timmg wrote:
| I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified.
| I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-
| mongering.
|
| Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build
| nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no
| traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.
|
| They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate
| electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
| infecto wrote:
| Yeah it's wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are
| getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued
| demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting
| most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When
| building a facility requiring large electric or water usage
| that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get
| connected with 10 or 20 year contracts.
|
| It's a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is
| seen as negative.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Its pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a
| total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against
| all technological or industrial advancement. They are just
| getting back to their roots.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Yes pollution.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-powe...
| agscala wrote:
| My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and
| electricity, driving costs up for local residents.
|
| Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute
| back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added
| jobs are mostly temporary (construction)
|
| In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term
| jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you
| ask me
| tdb7893 wrote:
| You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but
| electricity costs are actually _rising_ significantly for most
| people I know (I 've had to help friends pay electricity bills
| recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but
| electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people
| and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to
| generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water
| usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate
| for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already
| a serious worry to people already struggling to afford
| electricity.
| timmg wrote:
| But if electricity prices go up, doesn't that motivate new
| generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up,
| then supply increase, then prices go down.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I'm not an expert but I know that new electric capacity
| takes a while and often a lot of investment (both in
| generation but also people forget all the other
| infrastructure necessary to get it to the right place, new
| transmission lines especially have been a problem) so both
| of those factors seem to have kept it high for at least
| some amount of time and also it's not even guaranteed they
| will since price increases seem to have been surprisingly
| sticky across a lot of stuff recently. Also, not to be too
| glib, but try the "prices will eventually go back down"
| argument on people who have to make the decision between
| paying for electricity or food _this month_ and you 'll see
| how well that argument goes over. Financial issues are
| pretty immediate to the large swaths of American living
| paycheck-to-paycheck.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In addition to environmental concerns (including power and
| water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to
| data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks
| the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to
| the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details
| like this came out around Amazon warehouses. _The fact is, the
| local communities don 't reap the benefits from these despite
| having to shoulder the cost._ Once built, they provide few, if
| any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new
| products or services are provided.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Data centers absolutely cause pollution.
| triceratops wrote:
| > And solar is getting really cheap.
|
| Alas...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/wind-s...
| gosub100 wrote:
| I find it strange that when there is a housing crisis, they
| can't seem to build enough, frequently because of building
| permit refusals. But when a data centers get secrecy and fast
| tracked before anyone can oppose them.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Is there evidence of "fast tracking"? I'm imagining
| permitting a green field data center build is different from
| densification of an already populated urban place.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a
| cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government
| disability payments which seems to be the main income source
| there.
| StarterPro wrote:
| There is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge
| on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they
| do when these are no longer needed?
|
| I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
| spaceribs wrote:
| I can't wait for cheap RAM and SSDs to flood the market...
| riskable wrote:
| > what will they do when these are no longer needed?
|
| Bitcoin-->Altcoin-->NFTs-->StableCoin-->AI-->They'll just
| invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on.
|
| It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's that linear
|
| https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-
| venezue...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The compute will find a use case; if the AI bubble bursts I'm
| sure all the excess capacity will be rerouted to crypto again.
| But also, there's still plenty of usage in chatbots or image /
| video generation, I'm not convinced that will just stop.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every
| day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.
| croes wrote:
| > as they are currently implemented
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from
| them.
| kakacik wrote:
| At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the
| burden of that cost?
|
| Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the
| latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric
| cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire
| ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some
| others don't.
|
| Different moral values and such.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Are you using a phone and computer or bank or website
| that doesn't have mined materials?
|
| Surely you use things with negative externalities because
| you get value from them.
| croes wrote:
| Didn't know you are the complete humanity.
|
| Somebody get daily value from rising food prices, isn't
| as good for humanity
| cowpig wrote:
| You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of
| your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?
| Noaidi wrote:
| With no disrespect to GorbachevyChase, I am going to say
| that this lack of understanding externalities is a trait of
| sociopathy.
| simianwords wrote:
| are _you_ capable of consdering the advantages that AI can
| bring instead of simply focusing on the easy parts like
| pollution and energy?
| cowpig wrote:
| AI has incredible potential for both
|
| But the negatives are spiraling out of control. Pollution
| and energy and the amplification of structural social
| problems like wealth stratification, authoritarianism,
| media manipulation...
|
| With great power comes great responsibility, and we're
| living in an era in which our culture has shifted
| dramatically towards accepting immoral, short-sighted,
| and reckless behaviour.
| simianwords wrote:
| you could have said the same about any technology -
| industrial revolution, the internet - anything really.
|
| always easy to talk about concerns.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Commensurate to the actual cost?
| sixo wrote:
| Certainly commensurate to the _price_. It 's up to the
| companies to bring the cost under the price.
|
| AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being
| high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns
| are outlandish, for one--a day of moderately heavy LLM
| usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared
| to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern
| human. And the water usage of a data center is
| approximately the same as agriculture _per acre_.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for
| the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing
| on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates
| ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.
| simianwords wrote:
| it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest
| estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms
| use
|
| > The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn
| farms, equivalent to 1% of America's total irrigated
| corn.
|
| https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-
| fake...
|
| Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption
| btw.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Compared to the fair market cost of human labor? It might
| be thousands of times more efficient.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Do you have children? Post some pictures of them so Grok can
| show us what they look like unclothed and covered in
| "yogurt".
|
| It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but
| our ruling class has decided against that.
| bradford wrote:
| Let's avoid falling into the trap of assuming the worst of
| people when replying to comments.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| It's no more useful than when google and stack overflow was
| at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding
| performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered.
| Everything else gen AI is dystopian.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Why not debate me rather than downvotes? Eh hallucinations
| break my workflow and end up costing me more time debugging
| then it's worth.
| Noaidi wrote:
| No say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see.
|
| Also interesting that these investors could have invested in
| power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not
| interested in investing in people.
|
| When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by
| the people of the community.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Kind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of
| people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas
| City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out
| of them.
| xborns wrote:
| I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back
| door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former
| Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously
| by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on
| the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their
| infrastructure?
|
| For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups
| are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted
| petition that forced approving projects over tax financed
| projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.
|
| https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| A $500m TIF district for a city that takes in $10m annually and
| holds <$100m in assets? I've seen some really dumb uses for
| TIFs before but this might just take the cake.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to
| stop an upcoming vote_
|
| Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason)
| but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy
| them as a means to cut out the voters.
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| I don't like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in
| order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be
| public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or
| important to be located in that county. The leaders in these
| companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to
| Standard Oil their way in.
|
| I also don't understand the vehement push back against data
| centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and
| business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their
| manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back
| long term commitments and the people there don't want it?
|
| I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI
| has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to
| support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear
| plant even to support growth.
|
| How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to
| bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?
|
| One of the boomer-issues I've heard, as I characterize it since
| it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are
| taking away farm land and they're pouty about it. However that
| farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting
| as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren't
| feeding the state anyways.
|
| Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation
| who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can't be built
| because they don't like it. It isn't a very compelling argument.
| Throaway1982 wrote:
| its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont
| add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| So add 0 jobs because people don't like chatgpt and it won't
| create the same amount as 1960's manufacturing; or add some
| jobs to rural WI?
|
| You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how
| impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There's a
| lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building
| data centers.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data
| centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are
| real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center
| planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from
| the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio
| where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data
| centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County
| is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household
| uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in
| state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.
|
| So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize
| facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists,
| raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs
| many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation
| of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in
| support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs
| borne by residents.
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data
| centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin.
| Like I said in my comment, some states aren't well equipped
| to handle new manufacturing/dc.
|
| I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is
| plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I
| described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere
| people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments
| seriously.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into
| an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of
| a time getting answers to questions.
|
| The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre
| parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well
| above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation
| for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation
| increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is
| using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property
| values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in
| the future is very slim.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| They primary concern is these centers will force water and
| energy expansions and those will be equally split.
|
| Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check
| equally split or based on drinks had?
|
| The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be
| paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.
| phil21 wrote:
| Power is metered.
|
| If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of
| the ratepayers then it's a pricing problem that needs fixing.
|
| The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing
| in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that
| capital investment needs to happen at once. You can't even
| build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to
| the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone.
|
| Typically industrial consumers of electricity with
| predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric
| grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that's reflected
| in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility.
|
| If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation
| capacity that's a much larger failure further upstream by
| regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too
| for many years. It's coming for us either way if we want to
| remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You
| can only maximize financialization for so long until you need
| to start actually making stuff again.
| manIliketea wrote:
| > Power is metered.
|
| Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times
| (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed
| costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of
| projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive
| data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they
| incur on the system.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Foxconn on steroids
| duped wrote:
| Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building
| anything.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Hint: Many people think there are no reasonable plans to use
| these data centers.
| almosthere wrote:
| These data centers are causing people with specific (probably
| autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is
| unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only
| the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it
| causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"
| PTOB wrote:
| Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.
|
| Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities,
| and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities
| driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential
| developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex
| subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and
| roads.
|
| There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a
| region should consider paying for these things to benefit the
| owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to
| support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment
| facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that
| can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks
| making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company
| which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of
| revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or
| downright negligent at worst.
|
| Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn
| more about how all this works [or doesn't]?
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| because these entities have lots of money to pay people to
| convince local government that they should let them build their
| misery factories within their jurisdictions for "muh tax
| revenue" (that is paltry because corporate taxes end up being
| cut in the race to attract these vampires) and "muh jobs" (that
| usually dry up once the current thing in {industry} dies and
| the communities get left with the refuse. see also: the
| fracking and natural gas boom from ~20 years ago in the rust
| belt and the midwest).
| mceachen wrote:
| Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are
| par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should
| be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board
| member approving deals that impact their community.
|
| It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the
| immediate tax revenue.
|
| It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future
| financial burdens from a given project. No company will have
| any incentive to be forthright with that information.
| PTOB wrote:
| Thanks for that link. Great starting point for me.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Almost everything in our society should be by-right not
| discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by
| outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets
| the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent
| extraction.
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| Wisconsin runs mostly on coal power plants. It's a terrible place
| to build data centers.
|
| My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled
| by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the
| future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I was about to ask where they plan on getting the extra power.
| They are anti solar and wind, so they will either need to burn
| coal or import it or both (or change the laws!)
| w10-1 wrote:
| fun fact: insider trading in stocks is illegal, but insider
| trading in real estate is not.
|
| So if someone is even considering buying a big block of land,
| anyone who knows about it can buy first in the area. That drives
| confidentiality agreements (which increase the value of being an
| insider).
|
| Similarly, for large players to make large stock transactions,
| proceeding through the public markets led to traders seeing the
| bid/ask volume and act first, making it more costly. That lead to
| dark pools and off-exchange trading, which has become the
| majority (in dollar volume) since roughly 2024. So the "public"
| markets are now just tracking private ones.
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