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This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve.
by deepGem 8mo ago
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
- EdwardDiego 8mo agoSo freedom from law and regulation?
- deepGem 8mo ago[flagged]
- jeltz 8mo agoSo why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
- deepGem 8mo agoI meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
- aforwardslash 8mo agoWhy is it an example? Can you cite any case where "regulation" trumpled the construction of a properly designed datacenter? Or what you meant was "those poor billionaires can't do as they please with common resources of us all, and without any accountability"? As a quick anecdote, there is a DC in construction in Portugal with a projected capacity of 1.2GW, powered by renewables.
- XorNot 8mo agoThere's also a bunch of countries pretty much begging companies to come and build solar arrays. If you rocked up in Australia and said "I'm building a zero-emission data center we'll power from PV" we'd pretty much fall over ourselves to let you do it. Plus you know, we have just a bonkers amount of land. There is already a Tesla grid levelling battery in South Australia. If what you're really worried about is regulations making putting in the renewable energu expensive, then boy have I got a geopolitically stable, tectonically stable, first-world country where you can do it.
- jeltz 8mo agoThen maybe you should move here. We have in most cases well functioning regulations. Of course there are counter examples where it has been bad but data centers is not one of them. It is easy to get permits to build one.
- gf000 8mo agoWhere a random malicious president can't just hijack the government and giga-companies can't trivially lobby lawmakers for profits at the expense of citizens?
- deepGem 8mo agoA random malicious president ? Who was democractically voted by more than 70% of the country ?
- throwaway290 8mo ago> Not all law and regulation is created equal. Look at Europe. You're spot on but you are not saying what you think you're saying)
- blactuary 8mo agoHe "learned" by illegally poisoning black people > an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve no he won't
- deepGem 8mo ago[flagged]
- monocasa 8mo agohttps://theblackwallsttimes.com/2025/05/27/elon-musks-memphis-ai-facility-under-fire-for-polluting-black-neighborhood/ https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2025/05/27/elon-musks-memphi...
- deepGem 8mo agoThank you. This is really nasty. Boxtown residents should sue xAI and take them to court.
- 12_throw_away 8mo agoI'm confused, wouldn't this be just using the power of the government to enforce short-sighted, tech-hostile regulations like "datacenters should not poison people"?
- markhahn 8mo agoMaybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land. Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
- deepGem 8mo agoSkepticism is valid. The environmentalists came after dams too.
- mbushey 8mo ago> Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
- reverius42 8mo agoI think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
- bigfatkitten 8mo ago> Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Every DC I’ve been in (probably around 20 in total) has been multi storey.
- lambdaone 8mo agoMultistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.