3 ms·

There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

542458 9mo ago
Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
- brandonb 9mo ago
  NASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.
- janice1999 9mo ago
  Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
  - briffle 9mo ago
    I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter. Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
    - andruby 9mo ago
      Should still be orders different from a the continuous labor intensive manufacturing of F35's
      - bespokedevelopr 9mo ago
        Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.
    - gosub100 9mo ago
      It's still contract work. When it's over so is your paycheck.
      - almosthere 9mo ago
        Construction is one of the jobs that's booming nationwide.
      - phil21 9mo ago
        For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle. It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three. Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
    - SketchySeaBeast 9mo ago
      How big is the business?
  - ecshafer 9mo ago
    In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
    - its_ethan 9mo ago
      I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets. Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town. There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
      - chneu 9mo ago
        Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things. When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed. Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
        its_ethan 9mo ago
        Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been. And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially). Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom". It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape". At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
janice1999 9mo ago
“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
sailfast 9mo ago
They don’t, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.
drunner 9mo ago
The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.
- taco_emoji 9mo ago
  I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - its_ethan 9mo ago
    > Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes. I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact? Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
    - coredog64 9mo ago
      I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is the percentage increase when used for cooling?
      - beart 9mo ago
        Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.
threetonesun 9mo ago
I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia. My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
Aurornis 9mo ago
Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing. Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed. Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center. Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times. > I guarantee it's not to run LLMs. Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
cobolcomesback 9mo ago
It’s to run LLMs. In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water. Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication. Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
- leptons 9mo ago
  >Oregon for example also has cheap power and water. Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money? Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-ai-grid-reasons https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...

542458 9mo ago

Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.

brandonb 9mo ago
NASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.
janice1999 9mo ago
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
- briffle 9mo ago
  I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter. Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
  - andruby 9mo ago
    Should still be orders different from a the continuous labor intensive manufacturing of F35's
    - bespokedevelopr 9mo ago
      Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.
  - gosub100 9mo ago
    It's still contract work. When it's over so is your paycheck.
    - almosthere 9mo ago
      Construction is one of the jobs that's booming nationwide.
    - phil21 9mo ago
      For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle. It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three. Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
  - SketchySeaBeast 9mo ago
    How big is the business?
- ecshafer 9mo ago
  In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
  - its_ethan 9mo ago
    I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets. Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town. There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
    - chneu 9mo ago
      Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things. When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed. Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
      - its_ethan 9mo ago
        Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been. And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially). Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom". It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape". At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

janice1999 9mo ago

“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

sailfast 9mo ago

They don’t, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.

drunner 9mo ago

The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.

taco_emoji 9mo ago
I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- its_ethan 9mo ago
  > Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes. I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact? Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
  - coredog64 9mo ago
    I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is the percentage increase when used for cooling?
    - beart 9mo ago
      Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.

threetonesun 9mo ago

I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia. My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".

Aurornis 9mo ago

Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing. Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed. Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center. Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times. > I guarantee it's not to run LLMs. Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?

cobolcomesback 9mo ago

It’s to run LLMs. In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water. Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication. Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.

leptons 9mo ago
>Oregon for example also has cheap power and water. Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money? Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-ai-grid-reasons https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...