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I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considerin

by dguest 8mo ago

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice? Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

infecto 8mo ago
I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc. There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
  I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.
a2128 8mo ago
This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
- bparsons 8mo ago
  Don't give them any ideas
- jjkaczor 8mo ago
  Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
- datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
  It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation. But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power. Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
  - mistrial9 8mo ago
    the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too
    - datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
      Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior… Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates. Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
      - hobs 8mo ago
        Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/railroads-in-late-19th-century/ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor... Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.
Supermancho 8mo ago
> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?
  - Supermancho 8mo ago
    Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
    - sneak 8mo ago
      How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?
      - kakacik 8mo ago
        For such a massive long term impact, people should vote directly. That's ideal, and its pretty realistic ideal especially with 800 votes which are trivial to count. If course its not ideal for the company investing. Then the question becomes if rights/wishes of people are above of those of companies. Often, in Europe they are not, and often in US they are, exceptions notwithstanding.
      - 8mo ago
vasco 8mo ago
Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money. So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.
buellerbueller 8mo ago
Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.
emsign 8mo ago
Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of: * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick * power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials * rising electricity bills * rising water bills
- jandrewrogers 8mo ago
  > use too much ground water Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example. The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
  - zoeysmithe 8mo ago
    Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off. These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
    - emsign 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - wizzwizz4 8mo ago
        If they're shills (= people being paid to behave a certain way), then delusional doesn't come into it. However, such commentary on downvotes isn't productive. From the news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote: - Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.
- convolvatron 8mo ago
  I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?
  - GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
    Larry Fink is personally responsible for more insane progressive policies and pogroms in publicly traded companies than any other single individual. Historically, maybe Lenin was worse. Brendan Eich, father of JavaScript, was excommunicated from Mozilla for having private opinions not in line with the progressive ersatz religion. You’re not being serious here. There is nothing grass roots about “AI will cause drought and famine” nonsense coming from the infotainment content mills. I don’t blame anyone for keeping their work out of the hostile press.
miki123211 8mo ago
There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land." The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build. Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
- e40 8mo ago
  The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.
  - slfnflctd 8mo ago
    The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute. Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
    - duped 8mo ago
      Pay them more then
    - bluedino 8mo ago
      Very few people work in datacenters
    - sylos 8mo ago
      so datacenters should be allowed to come into communities, consume their resources and barely hire the local populace?
mkarrmann 8mo ago
Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid. Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.
- topaz0 8mo ago
  In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
  - dguest 8mo ago
    The only way this makes sense for communities is as a kind of "finder's fee", i.e. you might argue that if BigTechOne™ knew that they'd have to bid against BigTechTwo™ they'd never even bother to scope out the location. Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.
  - PTOB 8mo ago
    ^ This right here.
duped 8mo ago
> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project. It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that. The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."
- wat10000 8mo ago
  It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.
  - duped 8mo ago
    My rate has been consistently 40-60% higher over the last year independent of weather
    - wat10000 8mo ago
      Your rate, or your bill? I'm seeing people complain about their bills. None of them ever come back and discuss how much of the change was due to changes in their rate versus changes in their usage.
- bluedino 8mo ago
  They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media. Ironic.
eigencoder 8mo ago
Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down. When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take." I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.
- wat10000 8mo ago
  I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.
  - macintux 8mo ago
    > Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word > It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt > And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal
    - lagniappe 8mo ago
      They say trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback
  - bell-cot 8mo ago
    "Doing that would fail to align with the company's current priorities. And by the way - you're fired." -Catbert
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
  it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.
analog31 8mo ago
A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain. When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it. A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.
kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.
- tokai 8mo ago
  But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.
- dguest 8mo ago
  I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much". If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
    > you're liable to have holdouts That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.
- salawat 8mo ago
  Reputation working as designed?
packetlost 8mo ago
This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here. I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.
upboundspiral 8mo ago
What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades. They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left. Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states. The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity. The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates. https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry-impacts-in-virginia/ https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry... https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/americas-ai-boom-is-running-into-an-unplanned-water-problem/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri... https://archive.ph/9rY9Z https://archive.ph/9rY9Z
- kjkjadksj 8mo ago
  What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.
  - expedition32 8mo ago
    Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...
AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know". This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it. If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information. That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.
tptacek 8mo ago
Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.
Exoristos 8mo ago
The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.

by dguest 8mo ago

infecto 8mo ago

I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc. There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.

GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.

a2128 8mo ago

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying

bparsons 8mo ago
Don't give them any ideas
jjkaczor 8mo ago
Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation. But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power. Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
- mistrial9 8mo ago
  the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too
  - datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
    Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior… Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates. Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
    - hobs 8mo ago
      Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/railroads-in-late-19th-century/ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor... Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.

Supermancho 8mo ago

> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.

JKCalhoun 8mo ago
Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?
- Supermancho 8mo ago
  Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
  - sneak 8mo ago
    How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?
    - kakacik 8mo ago
      For such a massive long term impact, people should vote directly. That's ideal, and its pretty realistic ideal especially with 800 votes which are trivial to count. If course its not ideal for the company investing. Then the question becomes if rights/wishes of people are above of those of companies. Often, in Europe they are not, and often in US they are, exceptions notwithstanding.
    - 8mo ago

vasco 8mo ago

Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money. So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.

buellerbueller 8mo ago

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

emsign 8mo ago

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of: * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick * power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials * rising electricity bills * rising water bills

jandrewrogers 8mo ago
> use too much ground water Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example. The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
- zoeysmithe 8mo ago
  Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off. These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
  - emsign 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - wizzwizz4 8mo ago
      If they're shills (= people being paid to behave a certain way), then delusional doesn't come into it. However, such commentary on downvotes isn't productive. From the news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

GorbachevyChase 8mo ago

The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote: - Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.

convolvatron 8mo ago
I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?
- GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
  Larry Fink is personally responsible for more insane progressive policies and pogroms in publicly traded companies than any other single individual. Historically, maybe Lenin was worse. Brendan Eich, father of JavaScript, was excommunicated from Mozilla for having private opinions not in line with the progressive ersatz religion. You’re not being serious here. There is nothing grass roots about “AI will cause drought and famine” nonsense coming from the infotainment content mills. I don’t blame anyone for keeping their work out of the hostile press.

miki123211 8mo ago

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land." The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build. Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

e40 8mo ago
The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.
- slfnflctd 8mo ago
  The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute. Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
  - duped 8mo ago
    Pay them more then
  - bluedino 8mo ago
    Very few people work in datacenters
  - sylos 8mo ago
    so datacenters should be allowed to come into communities, consume their resources and barely hire the local populace?

mkarrmann 8mo ago

Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid. Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

topaz0 8mo ago
In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
- dguest 8mo ago
  The only way this makes sense for communities is as a kind of "finder's fee", i.e. you might argue that if BigTechOne™ knew that they'd have to bid against BigTechTwo™ they'd never even bother to scope out the location. Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.
- PTOB 8mo ago
  ^ This right here.

duped 8mo ago

> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project. It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that. The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."

wat10000 8mo ago
It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.
- duped 8mo ago
  My rate has been consistently 40-60% higher over the last year independent of weather
  - wat10000 8mo ago
    Your rate, or your bill? I'm seeing people complain about their bills. None of them ever come back and discuss how much of the change was due to changes in their rate versus changes in their usage.
bluedino 8mo ago
They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media. Ironic.

eigencoder 8mo ago

Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down. When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take." I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.

wat10000 8mo ago
I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.
- macintux 8mo ago
  > Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word > It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt > And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal
  - lagniappe 8mo ago
    They say trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback
- bell-cot 8mo ago
  "Doing that would fail to align with the company's current priorities. And by the way - you're fired." -Catbert
b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

analog31 8mo ago

A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain. When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it. A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.

kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago

The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.

tokai 8mo ago
But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.
dguest 8mo ago
I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much". If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  > you're liable to have holdouts That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.
salawat 8mo ago
Reputation working as designed?

packetlost 8mo ago

This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here. I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.

upboundspiral 8mo ago

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades. They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left. Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states. The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity. The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.

reactordev 8mo ago
Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates. https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry-impacts-in-virginia/ https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry... https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/americas-ai-boom-is-running-into-an-unplanned-water-problem/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri... https://archive.ph/9rY9Z https://archive.ph/9rY9Z
kjkjadksj 8mo ago
What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.
- expedition32 8mo ago
  Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago

> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know". This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it. If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information. That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.

tptacek 8mo ago

Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.

Exoristos 8mo ago

The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.