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> How does the data center "eat resources"? Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers - even

> How does the data center "eat resources"? Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers - even when the AI bubble bursts in a few years, the electricity prices will stay high (or in the worst case, get even higher) because the utility needs to recoup its investments. > How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then. Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. If you were to extract the appropriate amount of taxes to cover for the costs, you'd have to raise them so high that you'd strangle the entire rest of your local economy. And stuff like we have here in Europe, taxing corporate profits, is not applicable as well because the profit is officially being made at some Delaware site (or Ireland in our case), not at some random datacenter.

ch4s3 11mo ago
> Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers It seems like new power generation should be a trivial concern, the upper Midwest is incredibly windy. The block to adding new generation is mostly antiquated local/state laws about connecting to the grid interchange. It's within local power to fix that. It's the power company lobbying against more cheap energy that causes prices to rise. Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power. > Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. Then assess them on that basis. Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  > Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power. It's still waste. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, all these data centers will not be around as consumers any more. Just look what happened after the dot-com crash, and I'm not alone in thinking that the AI crash will be even worse than that. And once again, it will be the taxpayers left with the bill, with half-constructed ruins being a blight on their neighborhoods, and with homeless moving in to the ruins and causing fires and police calls. > Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law. Good luck trying to stand up as a community of, say, 10.000 people against the lawyers of a multi-billion dollar company. They will find loopholes or in the worst case get your entire law tossed out in court. That is why people are pissed, they know that the rich can afford to do whatever the fuck they want, with zero respects for the people affected by it.
JoshTriplett 11mo ago
> Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers Commercial power is often charged differently than residential power, and there's also nothing that prevents charging disproportionately higher rates for e.g. 90th percentile power usage. There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  > There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more. Well the utility will have to make investments that are on a depreciation schedule anywhere on the scale of 20-50 years... so there will have to be a general rate hike to cover for the bank loan (banks aren't stupid, they want at least something in incoming cashflow increase), and when the AI bubble pops, guess who will have their rates hiked a second or third time? Yup the average consumers.

ch4s3 11mo ago

> Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers It seems like new power generation should be a trivial concern, the upper Midwest is incredibly windy. The block to adding new generation is mostly antiquated local/state laws about connecting to the grid interchange. It's within local power to fix that. It's the power company lobbying against more cheap energy that causes prices to rise. Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power. > Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. Then assess them on that basis. Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.

mschuster91 11mo ago
> Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power. It's still waste. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, all these data centers will not be around as consumers any more. Just look what happened after the dot-com crash, and I'm not alone in thinking that the AI crash will be even worse than that. And once again, it will be the taxpayers left with the bill, with half-constructed ruins being a blight on their neighborhoods, and with homeless moving in to the ruins and causing fires and police calls. > Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law. Good luck trying to stand up as a community of, say, 10.000 people against the lawyers of a multi-billion dollar company. They will find loopholes or in the worst case get your entire law tossed out in court. That is why people are pissed, they know that the rich can afford to do whatever the fuck they want, with zero respects for the people affected by it.

JoshTriplett 11mo ago

> Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers Commercial power is often charged differently than residential power, and there's also nothing that prevents charging disproportionately higher rates for e.g. 90th percentile power usage. There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.

mschuster91 11mo ago
> There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more. Well the utility will have to make investments that are on a depreciation schedule anywhere on the scale of 20-50 years... so there will have to be a general rate hike to cover for the bank loan (banks aren't stupid, they want at least something in incoming cashflow increase), and when the AI bubble pops, guess who will have their rates hiked a second or third time? Yup the average consumers.