5 ms·
The DCs are going up across middle income countries: industrial zones in South East Asia, India and Morocco, and also UAE/Saudi. Anger towards DCs are pertinen
by energy123 4mo ago
The DCs are going up across middle income countries: industrial zones in South East Asia, India and Morocco, and also UAE/Saudi.
Anger towards DCs are pertinent from a politics-in-rich-country angle, but it has no relevance on the overall trajectory of where we are heading.
If DCs get banned in the US, there are still many middle income countries who want them in their special industrial zones, due to the FDI and employment opportunities they bring, and these countries provide generous tax breaks to hyper scalers to compete for their business.
Malaysia and India are recent examples of this policymaking. The new US funded DC zone in Philippines is another example.
There's an interesting geopolitics (emphases on "geo") angle to this if these critical assets are going to increasingly be built overseas.
- confidantlake 4mo agoThey provide very few employment opportunities.
- Hamuko 4mo agoYeah, the only point where DCs employ a lot of people are during the construction period. Maybe good if you have a ton of excess electricity and you need to prop up your local construction industry for the next five years.
- sanguinesphinx 4mo agoAlways with the threats. "You better roll over and take it, because those other countries are" How about the middle ground of ok, you can build the datacenter, but it's owned by the locality. They can lease it back to the builder for the privilege of being able to operate on their ground. And the lease is steep. No more second homes on the cape, or private italian schools for the kids.
- nfw2 4mo agoA random people on hn, presumably not a data center manager, is not "making a threat" by talking about potential second order effects of data center policy. No despicable data center apologist has ever suggested that communities shouldn't negotiate the best deal they can get to compensate for the incurred costs and externalities. Why do you feel justified defining what terms a community can agree to when considering hosting a data center? Do you not believe the democratic right for them to self-govern.
- lykr0n 4mo ago> employment opportunities the 5-7 people they employ during normal operation. High skilled engineers get flown in for setup and major changes/operations. They add little local economic value.
- energy123 4mo agoWhy does Malaysia give tax breaks to data centers?
- piva00 4mo agoDefinitely not because of long-term employment, even very large DCs only employ about a hundred staff on-site.
- nfw2 4mo agoA hundred is a lot bigger than five
- piva00 4mo agoStill very few for deserving a tax break based on potential employment opportunities. A DC simply doesn't help the local economy, it's very often a net-negative: it's very resource-intensive while not generating much in terms of economical activity for where it sits at. In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.
- nfw2 4mo agoThey consume land? Where does the land go?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nfw2 4mo ago