[HN Gopher] Maine is about to become the first state to ban majo...
___________________________________________________________________
Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data
centers
Author : rmason
Score : 206 points
Date : 2026-04-09 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gadgetreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gadgetreview.com)
| shevy-java wrote:
| Good. But will RAM prices go down again? I don't want to pay 2.5x
| as much as I did ~2 years ago, for the same piece of hardware ...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are multiple factors at here which have now gone beyond
| datacenters.
|
| 1. Iran war has made the prices of both helium gas and energy
| to asian countries higher which is making ram production more
| expensive.
|
| 2. Samsung workers are in a protest (15 thousand workers)
|
| 3. Jevon's paradox (even after turboquant, we might be just
| scaling things up in demand perhaps)
|
| 4. Some providers have already signed up/locked up more
| expensive deals so there is a more baseline of higher
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Do you have numbers for helium? Sure I've seen it mentioned,
| but is it even 1% of production cost right now?
| piker wrote:
| Such a law illustrates the beauty of federalism. Texas and other
| states can have them if they want them! Maine has not nearly as
| much space and much more natural beauty to protect [per square
| mile], so it can and maybe _should_ have a different set of
| rules. That 's cool.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty.
| It's a huge state.
| piker wrote:
| Yeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas
| just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters
| wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear.
| Also, energy is playing a role here.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I've been watching a series on YT that is specifically
| about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on
| the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with
| highways and routing around these communities decades ago.
| I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to
| be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of
| Cars 4.
|
| Those small towns are often positioned such that even if
| you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them,
| it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third
| order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their
| aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that
| they muscle in on valuable resources like water and
| electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by
| people, and driving the prices up.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Taking up land is one of the resources they use -
| consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large
| one, or the habitats that might have been in that space.
| That's not really an aesthetic thing.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Data centers use a lot of electricity but negligible
| water.
| AshleyGrant wrote:
| Folks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West
| Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no
| redeeming value.
|
| Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my
| favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape
| with intrinsic value and beauty.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Same with swamps and wetlands.
| asadm wrote:
| yes but they likely won't build datacenters by destroying
| national parks would they?
| creddit wrote:
| Because it's Republican, obviously.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all
| desert. (Really, it's all mountains.)
|
| The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S
| Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've
| driven through. It really did just feel like desert and
| billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
|
| But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated
| alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine
| Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
| taormina wrote:
| Between Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's
| considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style.
| There's very little not developed directly between the two.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| I drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some
| parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and
| spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but
| there were definitely people living there. And it was way
| too green to be called a desert; I've driven through
| actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in
| that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess
| you have to go further west to get to actual Texas
| desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
| lizknope wrote:
| Most people never bother to look at a map.
|
| It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the
| area and see lots of desert with strips of green
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA
|
| Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is
| called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas
| and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with
| cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means
| trees and forests and green in color
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province
| seandhi wrote:
| Ah yes, the vast, undeveloped wilderness of I-35 between
| Austin and San Antonio. Totally just unoccupied desert.
| blululu wrote:
| Nevada is a gem. Way too dry but incredibly beautiful with
| some truly unique features (ancient trees, hot springs,
| strange minerals, clear dark night skies). Eastern/central
| Texas is far less interesting.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time
| in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there,
| so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased.
|
| Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin
| it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will
| admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of
| southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is
| the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin
| (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't
| have the insane humidity).
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| They sure have a right to enact policies that keep them
| economically & demographically irrelevant.
|
| https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/638FA4CD35438/media%2FF5jNt...
| bdangubic wrote:
| Data Centers would have made them sooooooo rich, very silly
| policies indeed, they'd be swimming in money
| harimau777 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm? On the chance that it
| isn't, how would that make them rich? The profit from the
| data centers goes to the owner not to the people in the
| community or rest of the state.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| There's this thing called taxes...
| alphager wrote:
| That are paid (if not avoided) at the location of the
| owner, not the location of the dc.
|
| Datacenters really aren't that good for the locals. Low
| property tax, just tens of jobs but very high
| infrastructure needs.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I live in Northern VA, the _world capital_ of data
| centers and can co-sign this. they bring _absolutely
| nothing_ other than our electric bills have literally
| doubled in the last 24 or so months
| jmalicki wrote:
| There aren't taxes on datacenters in Texas. They gain
| virtually nothing from them!
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/08/texas-data-
| centers-s...
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| It's emblematic of Maine's wider anti-business and anti-
| growth climate which may explain why the state now has the
| highest median age in the US and one of the lowest
| fertility rates of any state.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states. Just NIMBY
| everything, NIMBY the power sources[1] [2], then complain about
| a lack of power so NIMBY any type of new industrial <anything>.
|
| Now do this for housing, new sources of water anything a person
| younger than 40 would need and you basically get a state full
| of retirees..and oh would you look at that! [3].
|
| Now the question is, why wouldn't all states eventually do this
| with the way our population pyramid is looking? It's basically
| rabid conservation and tragedy of the commons writ large.
|
| [1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-
| removin...
|
| [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-
| reject-q...
|
| [3]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't
| know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first
| place. As an obsessive self-hoster, I've researched building one,
| and there is no universe in which it makes sense. New Hampshire
| and Massachusetts are so nearby latency-wise.
| dpe82 wrote:
| Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime
| cost; especially these days when you're filling them with
| several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an
| important consideration of course, but not the only one.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life
| cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed)
| the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or
| more.
| jsnell wrote:
| I don't see how that number could possibly be realistic.
|
| A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power.
|
| 500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is
| $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic).
|
| TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by
| capex depreciation.
| jeffbee wrote:
| As has been repeatedly demonstrated[1], it is the presence of
| new, large consumers that drives down the cost of bulk power by
| amortizing the infrastructure investments.
|
| Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field,
| having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to
| Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed.
|
| 1: For example LBNL's latest banger: Factors influencing recent
| trends in retail electricity prices in the United States,
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Why on earth did they do that? Linking to a power station you
| didn't have to build seems like a no brainer. Was the deal
| that bad?
| rangerelf wrote:
| Do you have any links to support this? Because the
| commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they
| make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to
| live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC
| operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.
| jph00 wrote:
| "already substantially completed" isn't accurate. $450m of
| the eventual $1.65b cost had been spent at that point - so
| less than half.
| hatthew wrote:
| I'd call that substantial
| jeffbee wrote:
| Indeed, considering the much of the cost in the end
| consists of carrying costs, litigation, and year-of-
| expenditure overruns that were caused by the delay.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| This is so ignorant it hurts. The same exact proposition was
| voted down in New Hampshire years earlier, because the
| transmission line goes straight through natural forests, to
| Massachusetts, and has little to do with the state other than
| chopping down a bunch of trees. Neither Maine nor New
| Hampshire have an extra $1 billion to waste on enhancing the
| grid mainly for the benefit of southern New England states.
|
| Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting
| it down. The whole ordeal even prompted Maine voters to
| establish a new law to stop foreign investors from
| influencing local referendums because Hydro Quebec spent so
| much money trying to sway the vote.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for
| voting it down. "
|
| I mean yes, that is how the Tragedy of the Commons works.
| Everyone individually makes the optimal decision for
| themselves but in effect you've basically hamstrung green
| sources of energy around the country by being very smart
| for your own state.
|
| The question is, should you be _allowed_ to this.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I know little about this region. Why would it be unreasonably
| more expensive to build on one side of the state line than
| another?
| culi wrote:
| They are very dependent on natural gas and they also heavy
| environmental protections/pollution regulation that makes it
| hard to build stuff like pipelines and, hence, makes
| electricity more expensive compared to states with less
| environmental protections.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't know about this particular situation (NH and MA seem
| to have expensive power as well), but you can have
| significantly different costs on one side of the line or the
| other for regulatory reasons. State regulations can affect
| the cost of business significantly, and electricity is no
| exception.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'm from Nevada. Very aware that California has more
| regulation (and hence more cost than us), but know little
| about the regional cost differences between Maine and
| Massachusetts.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Fascinating. First you NIMBY the power, then you cite the
| power shortages to NIMBY the data centers. Win. Win.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's a lot more that contributes to power costs than
| NIMBYism.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Abundant access to a source of cooling can help offset high
| grid prices. Well places centres can a ton of money that way.
| kube-system wrote:
| Even in inefficient data centers, cooling is a minority of
| the power expense. Chasing a few percent of better cooling
| efficiency at the expense of a few percent more expensive
| power is a net negative.
|
| Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller
| efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also
| get _both_ by locating in the midwest or northwest.
| Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.
| gib444 wrote:
| Will a US state get the same kind of criticism a European country
| gets about push-back against big tech?
|
| Maine will go bankrupt? Maine will turn into a barren backwater?
| There will be no jobs?
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| There are already no jobs, it is already a barren backwater as
| compared to most other states. Other than the tourism options,
| Maine doesn't have a lot going.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If Maine passes this moratorium, and then starts accusing
| developers of malicious compliance for cancelling their
| projects instead of redesigning against the 20 megawatt limit,
| I'll definitely line up to make fun of them. My sense is that
| this isn't what's happening, and the Maine legislators
| understand and intend for this policy to discourage datacenter
| investment altogether.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| With low fertility and little reason for anyone to move there
| the northeast will turn into a barren backwater.
| blululu wrote:
| If it were a different state maybe but:
|
| >Maine will go bankrupt? No it's a bunch of poor old stock
| Yankees. They have no money but they are still fiscally
| solvent. >Maine will turn into a barren backwater? It's already
| a backwater. The goal is to keep it that way. >There will be no
| jobs? Unless working as a fisherman for half the year or a
| bartender for 3 months in the summer is counted as a job then
| nothing changes.
|
| Maine has always been out of the way and poor. I doubt this
| bill will change much one way or the other. As per the local
| idiom: you can't get there from here.
| xnx wrote:
| Did any major data centers want to locate in Maine, or is this
| just an empty gesture?
| simlevesque wrote:
| Empty ? Why call it that? It's proactive.
|
| Also it's naive to think they announce their intention to move
| somewhere. They try to cover it and never tell a soul until
| it's a done deal.
| tombert wrote:
| I think legislation like this is much more about making sure
| that they're never even considered by the big AI companies.
| OpenAI and Anthropic, when looking to build a new center, will
| see that there would be headaches trying to get a datacenter
| built, so they instead just focus on one of the other 49
| states.
| culi wrote:
| I think they're playing it safe. Data centers are at their peak
| of their hype cycle and it totally makes sense for Maine to
| place a temporary moratorium (it expires Nov. 2027) on new
| centers until the industry is a bit more stable
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| This is a big win for the progressive community.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/datacenters-...
|
| Nice to see some success for their ideas.
| taormina wrote:
| If they think this is progress, I call that a catastrophic
| failure. The other party has nearly started WW3, but let's make
| sure that a state no one wanted a data center in can't have
| one. Great strides for the progressive community. A single non-
| win.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| The progressive community is not about progress, it's about
| being progressive.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Was Maine ever at risk of being overrun with data centers?
| Regardless, if the ban is what Maine voters want then more power
| to them.
| smarf wrote:
| > more power to them
|
| that seems to be the idea!
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Except that's wrong because greater electricity demand
| stimulates greater investment and leads to lower prices.
| nemomarx wrote:
| https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-
| centers...
|
| It seems like that has pretty substantial time lag. Maybe
| require the ai companies to build power plants before
| they're allowed to build data centers in a certain region?
| dymk wrote:
| Like how demand for RAM and hard drives drove prices of
| those down, because of all that greater investment, right?
| culi wrote:
| It's not a ban. It's a temporary moratorium (on data centers
| requiring over 20 megawatts) until 2027 to give them time to
| research and plan for how to do data centers in an
| environmentally responsible way
|
| > The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination
| Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input,
| facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to
| address data center opportunities.
| lbarrow wrote:
| For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would
| support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
|
| Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives
| up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local
| environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not
| providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often
| highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.
|
| If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not
| data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
| km3r wrote:
| Why not just require factories /data centers invest in
| solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
|
| Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
| swarnie wrote:
| Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with
| solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction
| would increase when they release its half the county.
|
| But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
| bloppe wrote:
| It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing
| that actually matters. People don't really care about the
| presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect
| it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect
| it might have on public land use. You can always regulate
| the electricity market and public land use directly,
| instead of regulating the construction of data centers
| which is more of a second-order effect.
|
| These approaches might very well result in the same
| outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic
| market forces.
| butvacuum wrote:
| Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine
| with conversion efficencies half what they are now)...
| comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to
| generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent
| DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and
| crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like
| high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce
| water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of
| the field is covered with panels- at least according to
| some studies.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new
| datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of
| solar.
|
| Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is
| enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over
| 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users.
| If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it
| will require many times that amount due to how large the
| heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of
| Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
| butvacuum wrote:
| did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either
| way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water
| usage. So much so that comparing data center use to
| residential use without including industrial, commercial,
| and irrigation can only be in bad faith.
|
| Particularly since usage reports typically present all
| the numbers in the same chart or grid.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out,
| so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the
| context.
|
| The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes.
| Residential usage provides something relatable and is the
| general standard for these sorts of discussions.
|
| Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use
| anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new
| gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as
| aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they
| sink all that energy into water.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > I think the number of people opposing the construction
| would increase when they release its half the county.
|
| What's the math on that?
|
| It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production
| the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm
| subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar
| installations.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial
| to farmers
| butvacuum wrote:
| For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's
| inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of
| a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide.
| Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a
| square shorter on a side than most people's daily
| commute?
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion
| on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would
| be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol
| production.
| butvacuum wrote:
| Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take
| his word for it.
|
| The Department of Energy has all the data available, so
| do a dozen different other private and public
| institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some
| napkin math.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure
| necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't
| reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything
| they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good
| behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when
| dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to
| get the right to build once they've won back the trust of
| Mainers.
| butvacuum wrote:
| Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my
| area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose
| to tie into the grid.
|
| What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for
| infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of
| decreasing power usage.
| bluGill wrote:
| That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
| mmmm2 wrote:
| And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
| bluGill wrote:
| There are many customers to spread that over in
| proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting
| they have been doing for years
| Bratmon wrote:
| Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them
| to be a massive eyesore.
|
| The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you
| don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you
| don't like" as a compromise.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| Of course Mainers aren't monolithic...
|
| https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-
| legisla....
|
| https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-
| energy/so...
| Bratmon wrote:
| Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar
| panels on houses.
|
| And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants
| around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and
| garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want
| to see more of those things.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot
| like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever.
| The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some
| people down south who hate them make bank.
|
| Say what you want about resource extraction, it
| necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.
|
| I personally think it's short sighted but I see why
| they're not a fan.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider
| them to be a massive eyesore.
|
| I mean, _some_ do... this implies a terrible politician to
| not address the _material_ concerns of Mainers though.
| Bratmon wrote:
| Data centers don't really help the material conditions of
| Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data
| centers they'll really see, in material terms:
|
| - A brief boost in construction jobs
|
| - ~0 new jobs in the long term
|
| - Increased electricity prices
|
| - A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data
| center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
|
| It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from
| this decision. There's actually a good chance a data
| center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer
| materially, because the change in electricity demand (and
| thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is
| the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be
| more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
| culi wrote:
| The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a
| "moratorium" until November 2027
|
| And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking
| its efficacy and a lot of holes in it.
|
| https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-
| fa...
| ainch wrote:
| Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them
| to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure
| required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of
| solar.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and
| driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon
| neutral?
| ainch wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you
| expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets
| alongside developing energy infrastructure?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-
| nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or
| better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years.
| Maybe its dependent on location?
| cmiles74 wrote:
| You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are
| unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in
| particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs
| and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center
| projects are an easy target.
|
| I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype
| but the hype certainly made them a target
| antisthenes wrote:
| Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you
| with _checks notes_ a shitload of renewables after the AI
| bubble bursts.
|
| Something that should (with good governance) lower energy
| costs.
| vkou wrote:
| If you or Google have a plan to make the federal
| government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can
| re-examine the data center question after you carry it
| out.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Why? Because:
|
| 1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a
| _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in
| wattage used.
|
| 2. That investment should already be happening, not subject
| to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire
| investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some
| kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial
| effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds
| of biosphere degradation etc.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > Why not just require factories /data centers invest in
| solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
|
| That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide
| value to the people who live there.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act
| so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some
| loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then
| lobby to have the requirement removed?
| dakolli wrote:
| Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per
| square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing
| to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's
| the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?
| cloudfudge wrote:
| In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to
| banning them? The _actual_ alternative is obvious: _not_
| banning them.
| xphos wrote:
| The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have
| them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or
| not the people their want them. Its also a temporary
| moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more
| responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the
| public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.
|
| I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged
| in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the
| subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that
| and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data
| center business should learn from those industries how to
| conduct themselves
| cloudfudge wrote:
| > The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not
| have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them
| whether or not the people their want them.
|
| Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not
| banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is
| obviously no requirement to have them.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Being against a ban is equivalent to requiring that
| something be allowed. It might or might not end up
| happening, but either way it is permitted.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.
| rangerelf wrote:
| This right here is the right take.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Might have the effect of making it uneconomic, though,
| and then they wouldn't get built.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice.
| By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the
| allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but
| outright bans should be very well justified.
|
| Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system
| banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about,
| which in the era of social networks means twenty different
| things each year.
| petre wrote:
| It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva
| the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters.
| AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like
| Texas or Abu Dhabi.
| tt24 wrote:
| That's not what a free society is.
|
| That's like saying "Mainers should be allowed to ban
| speech they don't like, and private sex acts they find
| offensive". Your view of what constitutes freedom is
| nonsensical.
| chao- wrote:
| I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban".
| There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or
| outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a
| wide spectrum of attributes:
|
| - Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per
| year, density per area per year).
|
| - Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource
| usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three
| paragraphs on its own).
|
| - Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether
| that's residential areas, parks, you name it.
|
| These are just the first three examples that come to mind,
| and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up
| with more.
| slabity wrote:
| > modern factories are often highly automated and also don't
| provide too many local jobs.
|
| The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron
| Works alone has over 7k employees.
|
| The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was
| expected to employ less than 30.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers.
| Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI)
| datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
| beastman82 wrote:
| I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an
| employer of 30 jobs
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other
| businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not
| saying that is the case but it's certainly not a given
| unicornporn wrote:
| Are you saying that those thirty job will go to people
| _currently_ living in Lewiston?
|
| If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the
| minus side?
| tejtm wrote:
| that would translate to three townees for janitors the
| rest would be durn furiners from away *
|
| * further down east than Lewiston but, there was a time I
| was the damm foreigner from the big city.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and
| accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else
| in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn't
| have a glut of data center talent seeking employment --I
| wouldn't be surprised to hear that not a single person
| living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved
| would be employed there.
| dawnerd wrote:
| A sandwich shop would also be infinitely more useful to
| the population.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| imagine how many other 30-job employers could fit on the
| same land that the datacenter would take up.
|
| a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more
| than 30 people.
|
| (the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a
| proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger
| arguments to be made)
| andsoitis wrote:
| > a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more
| than 30 people.
|
| Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| neat!
|
| replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or
| "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and
| my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an
| argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument
| against them.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Bingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.
| Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after
| they're built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water,
| air pollution if it's self-powered, noise pollution (it's
| really worth watching Benn Jordan's video on infrasound,)
| ugly... the only local entities that win are the landowner
| and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I've
| seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big
| tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they
| employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the
| construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience
| doing it elsewhere.
|
| The people that own these data centers have only themselves
| to blame. They've been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that
| damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they're
| losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their
| turd sandwiches.
|
| Edit: I know it's gauche to talk about votes here, but this
| comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much
| less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount
| in downvotes. I'd eat my hat if there wasn't some kind of
| organized/automated brigading happening here.
|
| Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising
| given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the
| community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of
| these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be
| higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of
| the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution
| management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution?
| It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset
| the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the
| problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed
| by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
| bombcar wrote:
| Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it
| has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then
| demand them.
|
| Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a
| "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office
| building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be
| treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
| bitexploder wrote:
| True. There likely needs to be some sort of templating
| handled by states. Each data center and location will be
| different and require assessment. This does drive costs
| up for the data center, but I don't see another fair way
| to handle it really.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| They get their own unique third category as unlike
| industrial sites there's no hazardous chemicals and even
| the noise pollution is substantially different in nature.
|
| The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings
| that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of
| electricity.
|
| The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough
| electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum
| enough water for 100k households (but possibly many times
| that).
| bombcar wrote:
| Where does the water _go_ afterwards? Is it evaporated?
| Sewer?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Evaporated. Given how the water cycle works, it should be
| expected it will be precipitated back as rain.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I believe evaporative cooling is the norm (thus my
| "possibly many times that" remark doesn't apply) however
| theoretically they could provide hot water as a utility
| or (as you say) just dump it into the sewer. If located
| next to a river or the ocean they could conceivably
| dissipate it that way but I'm not aware of any examples.
|
| It's the sort of externality that could be solved with a
| well placed megaproject. A related question to my mind is
| why we're building such expensive strategic assets in the
| open rather than under a mountain.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| The city making money off of it doesn't make the impact
| smaller. You can't tax away the air pollution coming from
| a gas turbine running in a populated area.
| bitexploder wrote:
| That was my point. It doesn't all have to be taxes. It
| can also be agreed upon mitigation maintenance. Better
| filtration on gas turbines, etc. Green spaces to mitigate
| sound impact. I don't know, I am just wondering if there
| is a model that can be designed that makes a data center
| "balance" within its local environment instead of getting
| the opposite, tax incentives. Right now I agree, they get
| to socialize the costs and reap the benefits of building
| data centers to a large extent.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| That all sounds nice in theory, but does the Lewiston
| municipal government have the resources and expertise to
| determine what countermeasures would be effective? Would
| it be left up to the company paying for the mitigations
| to decide what's reasonable? I think we know how that
| would turn out. Even in heavily regulated states,
| industrial pollution still heavily impacts people in the
| vicinity. They usually accept it because so many of them
| work there. This place was estimated to employ 30 people.
| We don't even know if problems like infrasound are
| reasonably avoidable or mitigated, and it's not like they
| can make more water. Additionally, the way the industry
| has conducted itself over the past decade has been
| abhorrent. There's no reason to believe they wouldn't try
| to circumvent every last shred of mitigation knowing the
| city has comparatively minuscule resources to fight it.
|
| If we put them anywhere -- and I'm not convinced we
| really need all of the data centers we have, let alone
| all the ones we're building -- they should not be in the
| middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.
| order-matters wrote:
| youre starting a good conversation but as per typical
| internet fashion you are being critiqued as though your
| direction of thought is being presented as some sort of
| final solution.
|
| i completely agree that we should be looking into
| modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate
| its impact and what does that look like with current
| technology and costs, and where would we need to develop
| new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to
| consider mitigation a success
| rangestransform wrote:
| The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a
| tragic condemnation of how the US can't build shit at
| all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make
| our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns
| on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy
| alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left
| wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to
| use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere
| windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines.
| Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being
| cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to
| regulatory burden at all levels.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Yeah, but unfortunately, here we are, and there are the
| companies that want to build these things in completely
| inappropriate areas because it's more convenient.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| They lobbied for tax exemptions for 10 years or longer in
| most cases. Which probably is the useful lifespan, from
| most of the stuff in there
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.
|
| They really shouldn't be.
|
| There is a need for them and they aren't inherently
| damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some
| environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives,
| at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.
|
| But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to
| remove any regulation instead.
| AgentK20 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's a race to the bottom in most of
| America: If you pass such regulations locally or in your
| state, the data centers will simply choose to not build
| in your area of authority (county/state). Unless we were
| to pass sweeping, nation-wide regulations (which this
| administration is aggressively against because they
| believe we are in an AI arms race with China), those
| regulations/bans just drive the data centers elsewhere.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Maine obviously wouldn't have a problem with that, this
| law indicates they want them somewhere other than Maine.
| Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem
| far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large
| segment of the population that see outright bans as
| oppressive but support environmental regulations.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem
| far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large
| segment of the population that see outright bans as
| oppressive but support environmental regulations.
|
| So basically steal legitimacy from real environmentalists
| by applying their label to something that's not really
| motivated by environmentalism but can be construed that
| way?
|
| "They don't actually want what I'm selling so I'm gonna
| dress it up as something else, they'll never know"
|
| AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
|
| The other problem you're gonna have is that this isn't an
| original thought. You're at least 20yr late to the party.
| So, so, so much absolute garbage has sailed under the
| flag of environmentalism that the public is starting to
| be more critical (see for example the kerfuffle over wind
| turbines off Rhode Island) and it's not unforeseeable
| that eventually the environmentalists are gonna have some
| sort of purge or reformation or reversion to more
| traditional environmentalism and serving corporate
| interests in order to reclaim some lost
| respect/legitimacy. Trying to sail "obviously not
| primarily about the environment" stuff under the flag of
| environmentalism is only gonna hasten that.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Environmentalists are going to get blamed for the data
| center ban in Maine either way.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| But people probably wouldn't have a problem with them
| building a data center in central Aroostook. Nobody
| making these regulations wants to simply stop data
| centers from being built anywhere-- they're trying to
| stop people from building them where it will really suck
| to have them, like densely populated Lewiston. I actually
| left tech to work in manufacturing. I know the value it
| provides and how much it can negatively impact others.
| Big companies want to build this shit near population
| centers because it's more convenient, profitable, easier
| to hire people, etc. Tough cookies, I say.
| scoofy wrote:
| Obviously the solution is to tax them instead of ban them
| so they end up dispersing income to the surrounding
| areas. The entire point though is that they won't get
| built where they are taxed, and eventually, through
| regulatory capture or governance capture, they'll get
| built without having to compensate for their
| exteralities.
|
| The cynicism of residents is reasonable. They've have to
| be highly educated to actually understand the
| implications of what they're doing and how that revenue
| can be distributed. America's decline lends itself toward
| small-town corruption, where patronage is more important
| than communitarianism, due to large and accelerating net
| worth inequality, and an economy where outcomes are based
| on inheritance over labor.
|
| This explains the logic behind an outright ban. You don't
| have to be vigilant about corruption and the principle-
| agent problem if the thing is just banned.
| order-matters wrote:
| >The entire point though is that they won't get built
| where they are taxed
|
| I dont think this is entirely true. Maybe not the first
| wave of data centers, but there are a lot of factors that
| go into the cost calc and its possible that it would
| still be worth it to build them even if taxed.
| BeetleB wrote:
| He's not saying it's economically unfeasible to build
| where taxed. He's saying they'll simply build elsewhere
| where they won't be taxed.
|
| About a decade ago, a bunch of data center companies got
| fantastic deals with my city (low/no tax). People are
| pretty upset about it. A few years in there was a report
| on how many people they employeed. I think combined it
| was under 10 who lived in the area.
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean, just look at what happened with Foxconn in
| Racine, WI: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/what-
| happened-to-foxco...
|
| The community is a heck of a lot poorer now because they
| were convinced to offer incentives for a factory that
| never came. Once these firms can dangle hope in return
| for tax treatment or infrastructure, then you have a
| zero-sum game between townships where the winner -- if
| there is a winner -- ends up being the firm first, and
| the loser -- if there is a loser, will be the township
| first.
| overfeed wrote:
| > There is a need for them and they aren't inherently
| damaging.
|
| One solution: local taxes on the economic value generated
| by the data center. MNCs love to play accounting games,
| so a simple formula based on metered GWh multiplied by
| reported _worldwide_ revenue with a scaling factor a
| fraction of a percentage. This fund should be ring-fenced
| be address whatever externalities are introduced by the
| data center, including electric bill subsidies, infra
| maintenance, and funding independent oversight.
| Anechoic wrote:
| _noise pollution (it's really worth watching Benn Jordan's
| video on infrasound,)_
|
| Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's
| measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the
| sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong,
| among other issues).
| jesse_ash wrote:
| It was a bit misleading in terms of the audibility of
| infrasonic noise, but I think he did a good job of
| highlighting some of the effects of infrasonic noise on
| QoL/health with the study towards the end. IIRC, he also
| recorded some regular human-range noise that I would
| personally find disruptive to have to live with (though
| this was a fair bit closer to the data center than the
| claimed range of infrasonic noise's effects)
| andrepd wrote:
| > Though I've seen some astonishingly misinformed
| politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers
|
| My national government is currently giving massive tax
| breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the
| biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...
| sershe wrote:
| Doesn't this also apply to new housing? Strain on services
| per job created is probably even higher. The benefits are
| for someone currently not living here, just like data
| centers used for remote users. And if cheaper housing is
| available obnoxious poor people might move in. I think
| there should be a moratorium. Not in my backyard!
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I'm not sure who you'd expect to sway equating data
| centers to east coast urban housing during a giant,
| sustained housing crisis, but your obviously disingenuous
| argument is completely ridiculous.
| physhster wrote:
| Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if
| you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The number the developer gave in a press release was
| "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook
| data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50.
| Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the
| majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really
| help with employment because the contractors mostly come in
| from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for
| traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired
| mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever
| crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business
| though.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| From the Maine Monitor:
|
| _[...]the data center would have employed only about 30
| workers, the city estimated._
| bombcar wrote:
| Once it's built, it basically runs itself.
|
| You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe
| additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts.
| 30 sounds about right.
|
| Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had
| fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they
| rented out racks.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yep, and anything outside of that is contracted groups
| that come in from outside. Maybe a hotel in the area
| would get a little more business, but it won't be much.
| j2kun wrote:
| My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a
| vibes fight.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human.
| Ignore them at your peril.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up.
|
| I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the
| environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about
| electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing
| itself out of power[1],[2].
|
| I understand people are threatened by this technology, the
| tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these
| arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to
| hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial
| factories are a serious environmental threat but if they
| provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods
| along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.
|
| [1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-
| removin...
|
| [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-
| reject-q...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but
| not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
|
| Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see
| someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and
| selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you
| don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So
| regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and
| in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences
| and opinions.
|
| To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question?
| Did you really not understand that people have different
| preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and
| especially near them?
| threetonesun wrote:
| I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their
| economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and
| forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have
| environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are
| primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing.
|
| The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans
| on these things in states that could easily allow them with
| strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be
| built in places with no regulations?
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot
| machines.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people.
|
| OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by
| 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is
| likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit
| of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.
|
| Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe
| which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated
| power from their neighbours if needed.
|
| I would definitely support tech companies charging residents
| and especially government offices and legislatures of such
| states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having
| skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a
| form of skin in the game.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >who already use or (say by 2030)
|
| Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then.
|
| >do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their
| neighbours if needed.
|
| Which does put some distance between you and whatever
| disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was
| more important than safety.
|
| You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the
| next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets
| around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.
| yfw wrote:
| If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers
| like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant.
|
| Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all
| the externalities are being borne by them
| nutjob2 wrote:
| It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of
| power and provide very few permanent jobs.
|
| I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum
| smelters though?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I'm not particularly excited about construction on either of
| those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on
| "factory construction," however one would define it. And either
| way it's kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking
| about data centers not factories and 2) what I'm seeing happen
| with the data centers being built has made me pretty against
| them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-
| center-crashe...
| AvAn12 wrote:
| If they produce large negative externalities like data centers
| do, then yes absolutely.
|
| In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes
| they make (the negative externalities). With so much
| speculative financing available today, these costs are not
| being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random
| people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher
| electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new
| competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah,
| and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new
| forms of slop.
|
| Tech guys: can't you think of more economically useful products
| to launch?
| raincole wrote:
| > new competition for water
|
| Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to
| factories that make physical goods.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| This whole conversation is happening due to data centers
| existing...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think
| cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are
| far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the
| big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google
| and Facebook).
|
| On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports
| banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI
| companies entirely?
| pesus wrote:
| > On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports
| banning these data centers, why not support just banning the
| AI companies entirely?
|
| I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in
| the coming years in one form or another.
| fr4nkr wrote:
| The major data centers being built for AI are _much_ more
| energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they 're being built
| at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in
| the short term... or quite possibly even the long term,
| considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear
| power.
|
| Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is
| going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person
| than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential
| to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.
| orenlindsey wrote:
| I would argue that with the rise of coding and debugging
| agents, the AI data centers provide (or will in the near
| future) even more benefit than a car factory, in terms of
| digital infrastructure. These technologies are just a lot
| more invisible so we don't realize how important they are.
| pojzon wrote:
| Yet we read everyday that Agents generating astronomous
| amounts of slop and pointless projects are also straining
| global digital infrastructure.
|
| Which is also "invisible". Using this technology to make
| advancements in healthcare is 1% of its usage. While 99% is
| garbage apps noone needs, memes, deep fake videos and porn.
|
| AI as a whole for now is a net negative for the world.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Don't forget the portion that's used for mass
| surveillance, scams, and other blackhat shenanigans. Or
| supercharged personalized advertising with dynamic
| pricing. And you can't miss propaganda and dark money
| influence campaigns.
| rurp wrote:
| LLMs are and will be used as malware, propaganda, and slop
| generation agents more than they will be used as debugging
| agents. The amount of energy that we'll need to consume
| going forward just to defend against malicious users and to
| filter down the flood of slop is absolutely eye watering
| and will continue to grow as far as we can tell.
| pesus wrote:
| Can you explain how important they are? So far the benefits
| seem to be limited to faster code generation, which doesn't
| solve any actual problem people were facing, and is greatly
| outweighed by the negatives.
| efromvt wrote:
| I wonder why this doesn't get us frustrated with the grid,
| not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and
| offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self
| fulfilling prophecy: don't build new power plants. Don't
| build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can't keep up...it's
| defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different
| lens.
| trueno wrote:
| I mean one has to also consider the current political
| _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy
| needs. And given the current outlook and environments
| even states are now operating in with federal overreach
| shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's
| not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in
| this reality:
|
| - most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the
| moment
|
| - literally no one could tell you if scaling up with
| clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even
| going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up
| gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it.
|
| so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a
| state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure
| on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_
| economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is
| talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right
| way so it doesn't result in even more financial
| uncertainty for people that are already financially
| uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to
| give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable
| energy is going to be the backbone of the increased
| energy demand.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| To be fair, for decades, electricity consumption has been
| mostly flat. There has not been a need to massively ramp
| up new generation or distribution. It is only in the last
| few years that such mega consumers have come online that
| is requiring new development at a frantic pace.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Not true. Electric vehicles have been threatening to
| collapse residential grids for quite a few years now. The
| US hasn't been making the necessary infrastructure
| investments for a long time. See PG&E for example.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| For something the size of the electrical grid, you can
| find regional variations, but the national trend is quite
| clear. One report from a quick search[0]
| Consumption Growth Acceleration: After 14 years of near-
| stagnant growth (0.1% annually from 2008-2021), US
| electricity consumption surged 3.0% in 2024, driven by
| data centers, electric vehicles, and economic recovery,
| signaling a new era of demand growth.
|
| [0] https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-
| electricity-does-u...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| TBF multiple things can be true. A period of stagnation,
| a failure to perform sufficient upkeep, and a failure to
| keep up with new demand.
| anon291 wrote:
| Because we have decided that electrical generation tech
| ended once China became better at it.
|
| Instead of dealing with that like adults we are throwing a
| fit instead
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Also power is not at all a limited resource as many top
| voted post on HN thinks it to be. Increased demand
| decreases the price of power not increases it in the long
| term.
|
| And in any case ban doesn't make any sense. Instead they
| could charge different for grid electricity usage, and make
| the datacenter pay for grid expansion when they start
| building it.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| And a data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit
| whatsoever to its local community, unlike something like an
| auto plant that creates entirely new supporting industries to
| support it and its employees.
| cheriot wrote:
| Property taxes come to mind.
| xphos wrote:
| Local municipalities collect this and often get tricked
| into not collecting it via agreements to host it in or
| near their town for multiple year agreements. Also the
| assessed value of the property may not come anywhere near
| the costs of increased electricity demand, water usage
| and noise pollution problems. For locals
|
| Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but
| these places dont employ a large staff beyond
| construction. It a tough spaces.
| mediaman wrote:
| Loudoun County in Virginia generates $1 billion in property
| tax revenues from data centers.
|
| It funds half of all of their expenditures.
|
| Can you imagine having half of your total municipal
| government budget being paid for by data centers?
|
| Their citizens pay much lower property tax rates, and get
| much better schooling and police.
|
| Henrico County (also VA) took $60 million in unexpected new
| revenues from data centers and created an affordable
| housing trust that is subsidizing low-cost housing.
|
| Although these counties are figuring it out, it's an
| incredible failure in imagination for many of these
| liberals in other states to look at an immense source of
| new funding that could support schools, housing and health
| and just spurn it because they heard from a friend of a
| friend that they consume a lot of water based on a
| discredited book with elementary math errors.
| bombcar wrote:
| Hopefully they don't end up with a "Digital Detroit" when
| datacenters start closing.
|
| Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent
| means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30
| employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a
| factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the
| creditors at that time.
| no_wizard wrote:
| They're an anomaly that benefits from a number of factors
| like being close to the government for contracting, early
| data centers built there and they tended to congregate
| and dumb luck.
|
| They're an outlier and don't really prove much of
| anything.
|
| Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to
| show for it on any front, other than higher electric
| prices for consumers
| mediaman wrote:
| Oregon gave a lot of time-limited property tax breaks.
| They also don't have a sales tax.
|
| So I would agree that giving away the #1 way that data
| centers contribute to the government isn't optimal,
| though you could argue it's a long-term play.
|
| As the tax break terms expire, Oregon will get $450
| million in annual property taxes from the data centers,
| or about 1.4% of the state budget.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited
| book with elementary math errors.
|
| How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a
| continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what
| book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself
| it's quite straightforward.
| valleyer wrote:
| The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it
| pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-
| is-wildly-mislead...
|
| Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data
| center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans,
| erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200
| cc of water per day.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Perhaps part of the problem here is that most towns that
| have proposals for AI data centres (including my own)
| have the developers demanding 10 year tax abatements, so
| we aren't going to see any of that tax revenue.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit
| whatsoever to its local community
|
| Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers
| should not be built at all?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing
|
| This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on
| the order of 200-250 megawatts of power, which is either on
| par with a data center or slightly more than a data center
| depending on the size and how cooling is handled.
|
| [1] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/tools/Indu
| str...
| tadfisher wrote:
| New AI data center builds are being specified in gigawatts,
| my friend.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yup. Here's slides from last year's HotChips on where AI
| racks are going: https://hc2025.hotchips.org/assets/progr
| am/tutorials/HC2025....
|
| The racks rolling out now are in the 100s of KW each,
| targeting 1 MW per rack as the rough limit for using 400v
| DC.
|
| The next iteration is go up to 800v DC, riding the
| coattails of power management components from the EV
| industry.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I suspect uou've misread that document. It is a good
| document though. It's saying a large parts plant uses
| ~188,000 MWh, I think per year.
|
| A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.
| Those two things aren't the same. 20MW of continuous
| electricity use (which AI data centers do) translates to
| 175,000 MWh of electricity per year. That's about the same
| as a minimum and might be 5+ times more.
|
| This document is only about energy usage so we have to
| guess what "large" means in terms of employment but 3000 to
| 7000 seems to the range. Compared to 20-30.
|
| But AI data centers are worse because they actually produce
| what I call _negative jobs_. Their currently only value
| proposition is in laying off people and otherwise
| suppressing labor costs. All while the residents all pay
| more for their electricity with the money no longer have
| because they got laid off.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.
|
| I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW
| per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding
| 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest
| datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and
| the largest datacenters use 100x that.
| bnewbold wrote:
| Where are you getting the 200 megawatt number from?
|
| The document you linked says that a large auto assembly
| plant consumes around 188,000 MWh annually (with regional
| variation). By my quick math that is less than 22 megawatts
| baseline load (24/7/365).
|
| There is a mention that natural gas and other fuels being
| used on-site, are you converting those to MWh equivalent?
| I'm not as familiar with that conversion, but from a quick
| online calculator I found it would still be under 75
| megawatt for electrical and fuel-equivalent combined.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at
| a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat
| videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support
| banning them too.
| gensym wrote:
| No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to
| kill my livelihood and everyone else's.
|
| The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars
| they build are likely to murder everyone I love.
|
| The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about
| how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to
| implement a solution to the problems created by all the car
| parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.
|
| (To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI
| companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I
| support letting them go about their business?)
| ZeWaka wrote:
| One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and
| noise pollution.
| culi wrote:
| It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes
| sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of
| long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary
| bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles
| themafia wrote:
| > For people who support this kind of ban
|
| I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws
| that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means
| banning a particular new and pernicious development in their
| borders, then yes, of course I support that.
|
| > would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car
| parts.
|
| Has anyone actually done that?
|
| Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different
| about your desire for this type of ban?
| cma wrote:
| When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in
| Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a
| created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that
| state.
|
| They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't
| really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the
| created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.
|
| A factory that produces physical goods gets more
| straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against
| each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing
| jobs.
| bparsons wrote:
| Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the
| proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good.
|
| Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments
| have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential
| electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.
| zdrummond wrote:
| I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories >
| AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators
| currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more
| control over AI firms.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel
| about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how
| they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water
| as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many
| jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess
| but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market
| bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being
| abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to
| any industry.
|
| A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed
| speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial
| buildings on deforested land in their wake.
| myhf wrote:
| Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay
| onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to
| move.
|
| All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore
| immediately.
| sQL_inject wrote:
| It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract
| intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their
| educational institutions.
|
| The rest will fallow.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products
| of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of
| value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower
| latencies for corporations.
| rvz wrote:
| AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and
| find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did.
|
| Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were
| the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to
| that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient
| alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not
| need more data centers and energy requirements.
|
| Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building
| more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is
| getting to the point that the energy requirements going to
| surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-
| cente...
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would
| support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
|
| They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by
| saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive
| locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up
| international trade. But they're in denial about this so
| they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because
| hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at
| great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example
| comes along.
| xphos wrote:
| Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite
| them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major
| public drain and net negative on public resources.
|
| Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large
| numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public
| power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the
| profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non
| tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
|
| Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy
| communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants
| drain aquaifers.
|
| I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect
| these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being
| .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
| tjohns wrote:
| > Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large
| numbers of people... They are building and selling a non
| tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
|
| You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a
| higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax
| on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water
| consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what
| you're worried about.
|
| > Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy
| communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants
| drain aquaifers.
|
| Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often
| have emissions much worse than anything coming from a
| datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water
| as well.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > an excise tax on number of servers
|
| We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per
| logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.
|
| More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an
| asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't
| scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements
| should be directly rolled into their electric and water
| bills, which is to say that they should receive a very
| unfavorable rate.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It depends what the factory is producing.
| neophobia wrote:
| As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two
| reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural
| wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the
| fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global
| warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2)
| electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority
| shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid
| is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much
| owned by qatar.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories,
| that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with
| data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on
| the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the
| problem.
| kube-system wrote:
| It isn't necessary to evenly distribute industry across the
| entire country out of pettiness.
|
| Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters,
| they simply trade them.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms
| are tied to certain external factors in a way things like
| data centers aren't.
|
| but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it's not 'no
| housing,' it's 'just not here.'
|
| so when someone say 'let someone else host them,' it really
| comes across as: I want the internet, just let other
| communities pay the environmental cost.
| kube-system wrote:
| The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is
| also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is
| not the same in all locations. There are differences in
| land use, environmental requirements, power generation
| methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| People are worried about their power and water costs rising.
|
| I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that
| local governments often don't care about their constituencies
| and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business
| moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.
|
| I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for
| their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did
| not experience high bills. That would be the best case
| scenario.
|
| But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit
| second base case scenario.
| pesus wrote:
| Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI
| startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't
| financially motivated by their stake in an AI company _should_
| support new data center development for AI? Especially someone
| who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively
| affected by the construction and operation?
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is one heck of a straw man argument: "if you wanna ban
| datacenters but not factories they're basically the same
| thing".
|
| The current datacenter boom isn't general compute, but AI
| compute - a highly specialized form that's not adaptive or
| recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute
| should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-
| end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very
| real, and the reason they're shoved through has everything to
| do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get
| cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the
| harms of the buildout.
|
| As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China
| builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy
| while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians,
| roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just
| slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill
| society's best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power
| under fewer hands.
|
| So yeah, I'd be totally in favor of factories that build things
| and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up
| resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _This is one heck of a straw man argument: "if you wanna
| ban datacenters but not factories they're basically the same
| thing"._
|
| The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing
| against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said
| they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some
| level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
| jmyeet wrote:
| So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for
| electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This
| obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find
| for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are:
|
| - 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more
| for EVs, as an aside;
|
| - Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.
|
| Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of
| 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is
| 175GWh/year.
|
| So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably
| fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant
| producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars
| have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.
|
| Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing
| of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state
| economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a
| potential future value add that has yet to materialize.
|
| My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for
| employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages.
| That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers
| represent _negative_ jobs.
|
| Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the
| relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of
| electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be
| paying higher amounts for their electricity for that
| "privilege".
| romaniv wrote:
| _> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you
| would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car
| parts._
|
| If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and
| were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of
| years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.
| dreambuffer wrote:
| It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged
| in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race".
| The government is putting their hand into the market to try and
| shift this balance, when they should be creating basic
| infrastructure and services.
| burnished wrote:
| Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in
| general every now and again.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would
| support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
|
| Car parts factory?
|
| With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio
| comparable to an AI data center?
|
| I did not know those existed.
|
| But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes".
|
| A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs,
| reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic:
| Bitcoin means green energy!
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813
|
| (For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that
| the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is
| hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin
| in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making
| a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to
| the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto
| has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain
| implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-
| that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)
| 8note wrote:
| there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes
| factories safe or not.
|
| whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new
| factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored
| the environmental regulations?
|
| data center owners are much much more powerful than factory
| owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and
| congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened,
| youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories
| for, say, car parts.
|
| Those factories employ people.
|
| > Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which
| drives up electricity bills
|
| No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless
| it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap
| recycling in arc furnaces.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Several reasons:
|
| AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist
| class over labor more than new factories.
|
| AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied
| itself with the fascists.
|
| Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been
| particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves
| upon communities that don't want them.
|
| If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a
| recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to
| survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is
| useful.
| dwa3592 wrote:
| I don't think a blanket (ban or acceptance) anything is a good
| approach for this issue.
| 6thbit wrote:
| So what's the current data centers footprint in Maine?
|
| Does the move benefit companies with existing DCs whose
| competition can no longer establish a region there?
| didgetmaster wrote:
| How long until the AI companies start charging more to people who
| use AI services, but live in areas that do things like this?
|
| NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow
| drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas development, or power
| lines. When will the same happen for things like AI services?
| yfw wrote:
| Lol the corpos having too much power over consumers is because
| the local residents wont submit? You assume the company cant
| charge higher anyway out of the goodness of their hearts?
|
| This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt
| oversight.
| bluGill wrote:
| AI results are generally easy to transport - just a few bytes
| over some fibre. Electric is harder to ship, there is only so
| much you can put in a wire (even high voltage DC). Widgets (car
| parts...) are even harder to ship and take longer which is why
| big things often get final assembly locally.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The most expensive AI stuff is the least latency sensitive. A
| coding agent could be on a different continent and you wouldn't
| really notice.
| recursive wrote:
| Honestly would be kind of cool if a locality actually had that
| much power. It could lead to an enclave of people who still
| value thinking for themselves. In practice I doubt bigcorps
| would turn down the customers.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Why would anybody outside of tech care if the cost of AI goes
| up?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The people (through their elected representatives) have a right
| to do this. It is stupid, in my opinion, but they have every
| right to do so. If this is what they want, they should have it.
|
| Personally, I see little reason to ban new taxpayers with few-to-
| none negative externalities from moving into your state, but what
| do i know?
| mystraline wrote:
| One could absolutely design data centers that were energy
| positive and ecologically decent (with respects to pollution).
|
| For a known amount of data enter power, dedicate 125% of power in
| solar and battery.
|
| Need cooling? Use liquid geothermal loops. Or radiate energy back
| into space. We know frequencies that do not reflect in atmo.
|
| Acoustic pollution is another area. Acoustic tiles, building
| plans, and natural noise barriers are also of utmost importance
| too.
|
| We need more compute. Plain banning is not the way. Demanding
| highly ecological and conserving solutions is.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| For cooling you can also use a heat exchanger and dump it into
| a river or an ocean or so.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Closed loop heat exchange costs more electricity. It's not a
| free lunch that data center designers are overlooking.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| That is of course true, but it is at least not a totally
| unreasonable practice, unlike using fresh water straight
| off the grid as a cooling source.
| culi wrote:
| It's not plain banning. It's a moratorium until 2027. I think
| it's sensible policy given this craze is at the peak of a hype
| cycle and there's been a lot of investigative reporting on
| shady deals around hyperscaler infrastructure
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| This is a natural response to the excessive pushiness and
| underhandedness that's been used to build many of these new
| datacenters, often in direct conflict with the wishes of the
| locals. Maybe the firms paying to get them built should take a
| more diplomatic approach instead of trying to railroad projects
| through.
| ronsor wrote:
| Ironically railroads almost always got their way in the past.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Railroads were incredibly useful for the entire population.
| johnsimer wrote:
| AI is incredibly useful for the entire population
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Is that why the US's GDP is currently booming into
| infinity? Or is it only responsible for their
| unprecedented median standard of living?
| justonceokay wrote:
| You don't understand it hasn't trickled down yet
| cm2012 wrote:
| This has gotta be the dumbest issue in politics today. By far,
| the biggest use of data centers right now is on streaming Netflix
| and YouTube and stuff, but you don't see any protests about that.
| t1234s wrote:
| The people that ban this are they types that think the internet
| comes from their phone or electricity comes from the wall outlet.
| WarmWash wrote:
| If it meant that residents couldn't use AI, then the bill would
| be certainly dead.
|
| Given that, the bill is just for show, and not actually serious.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| What does this have with the _use_ of AI? You can use the
| services of data centers thousands of miles away.
| WarmWash wrote:
| That's why we ship our "recycling" to the third world. Enjoy
| the upsides while exporting the downsides to someone else.
|
| My comment is a statement on hypocrisy, and how if people had
| to bear the full cost of their decisions, they would decide
| differently.
|
| Maine is codifying this hypocrisy for shallow minded
| political points.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I shouldn't drive a car if I don't want an oil derrick in my
| backyard.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Don't worry, atmospheric warming will do you in the same.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| In terms of square footage there are few "businesses" which
| consume more resources (water, power, tax credits) and produce
| less onging local employment. More states and municipalities are
| going to do this, and rightly so.
| BlueRock-Jake wrote:
| I feel like this is always the case with new technology. People
| had the same reaction to the invention of the printing press. New
| is scary. It doesn't mean there aren't valid concerns, but
| unfortunately this feels a bit like an inevitability. The focus
| shouldn't be on stopping it, but how to maximize the gains and
| minimize the losses to the local communities where these are
| being built.
| franklinter wrote:
| Yes but totally insane that so many on this site seem to
| approve such a ban.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| You're not doing your side any favors by using the printing
| press of all things as your comparison. People very
| legitimately don't want things like fracking in their area even
| IF it brings a boatload of jobs due to the costs on
| communities.
|
| Datacenters might not be as potentially destructive, but
| they're also a massive net negative for the community in many
| real world ways. If you want them to "maximize gains", then the
| answer is "tax them more" which, shockingly, turns into a
| functional ban because somewhere else is taxing them less.
| mlsu wrote:
| This shouldn't be read as a carefully considered policy with
| upsides and downsides. It's obviously silly to just ban
| datacenters from a policy perspective.
|
| Read this instead as, people hate this shit. They don't want
| datacenters, they don't want AI, they don't feel like those
| things are doing anything for them.
|
| You will win the policy debate by saying:
|
| "a datacenter uses just as much electricity and provides just as
| many jobs as a car parts factory, so it's silly to ban the one
| and not the other when you can just as easily examine the
| externalities of the datacenter and blah blah blah"
|
| But you will be missing the point, which is that people see
| building car parts as a solid, upstanding thing which has
| tangible and direct benefits to people; whereas building an AI
| datacenter means allowing some rich California surveillance czar
| to suck the water and power from your local community so that
| they can steal your job, fracture your community, and impoverish
| your family. One is good and one is bad and the voter's choice is
| to do the good thing and not the bad thing.
|
| Even if car parts factories pollute more than datacenters do.
| culi wrote:
| FFS did anybody in this thread read passed the title?
|
| It's not just a plain ban. It's a moratorium until 2027 for
| data centers requiring over 20 megawatts. The temporary
| moratorium gives it time to build the infrastructure necessary
| to roll out data centers in an environmentally responsible way:
|
| > The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination
| Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input,
| facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to
| address data center opportunities.
| pb7 wrote:
| That seems fair. When these data centers are built elsewhere,
| people in Maine should be charged higher prices for the services
| delivered by these data centers.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Why not mandate that all data centers must be completely off the
| grid instead?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| So they install noisy, loud fossil fuel generators that pollute
| the surrounding area.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| That certainly is one way to do it, but I'm certain not the
| only one.
| culi wrote:
| Maybe they will. They are not banning them permanently. They
| are placing a moratorium until 2027 so they can research and
| plan for how to do data centers responsibly
|
| > The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination
| Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input,
| facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to
| address data center opportunities.
| joshfraser wrote:
| data centers drive up the cost of power. basic supply and demand.
|
| instead of blocking data centers, we need to scale up energy
| production. the solution is to get rid of all the red tape that
| makes it so impossible to build in America.
|
| quality of life metrics are highly correlated to the availability
| of energy.
| chris_va wrote:
| The actual language (I think):
| https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...
|
| It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price
| changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to
| define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on
| the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it
| does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.
| midtake wrote:
| Ban all data centers until they run off SMRs. Then you'll see
| nuclear take off like a rocket.
| djoldman wrote:
| From the bill text establishing a council to figure it out:
|
| > The council shall evaluate issues related to data centers
| located or proposed to be located in the State, with the goals of
| protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability,
| minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and
| appropriately sited economic development.
|
| https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Hate to sound all California, but some restrictions on
| datacenters and similar power/water users seem reasonable.
| Datacenters in particular vs. factories because of the nature of
| datacenter inputs and outputs.
|
| ---
|
| Will the DC cover the costs of its own expanded power generation
| needs? Are residential and small business users protected?
|
| Can the water system handle the increased usage in a given area?
|
| What physical discharges are created? Waste heat air, waste heat
| water, etc?
|
| What kind of noise will be generated? Are there limits on use of
| onsite fossil fuel power generation?
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| > The bill gained traction after residents in Wiscasset and
| Lewiston successfully opposed data center proposals over water
| usage and safety concerns.
|
| "Water usage" and especially "safety" are bullshit arguments
| against building new data centers - in particular the idea that
| data centers use a lot of water was popularized by the freelance
| prestige journalist Karen Hao, who got a lot of her facts
| egregiouly, sloppily wrong in her reporting about AI data
| centers. This is either retarded environmentalism unconcerned
| with facts; or the actual motivation to prevent data center
| construction is some kind of more nebulous distrust of big tech
| or AI companies or concern that AI will take people's jobs.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why? Why are progressive being regressive about this? What
| exactly is so wrong with data centers? They use electricity? Then
| just demand more power plants not some NIMBY bullshit that will
| just result in data centers being made in other countries. It's
| not like they're polluting anything. What exactly is so terrible
| about servers running quietly in a building.
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