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When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?
- Eufrat 3mo agoAre these AI-driven data centers actually getting built? I was reading about Kevin O’Leary’s initial proposal for his Utah data center and it’s just preposterous, it’s inconceivable anyone needs that much compute at any realistic demand level. The ask is so massively large that even the scaled down version is just absurd. We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exposed as a glorified PR stunt without any substance. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-apparent-failure-visit-key-site-questions-stargate-uk-project https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-ap...
- crawfordcomeaux 3mo agoHave you considered the compute demands for nationwide AI video surveillance?
- serial_dev 3mo agoAFAIK, video surveillance is less computationally expensive than LLMs, and much of the work can be done at the edge devices. So don’t worry, there is already probably a nationwide video surveillance system out there, even without Kevin
- shit_game 3mo agoRegardless of the computational needs to facilitate mass surveilance, there are inescapable storage needs precipitated by surveilance. Governments want to retain data because its value in the future is unknown in the present. This is the entire premise behind the Harvest Now Decrypt Later[0] principle that fuels much of the previous surveilance actions taken by governments. But HNDL is speculative; it either hedges on the bet that computational breakthroughs will weaken encryption methods to the point where brute force attempts at decryption are not financially feasible for most actors but still physically possible, or rely on a backdoor in an encryption algorithm to decrypt data that is valuable. There has been much speculation about this feasibility and value RE: quantum computation and also the design of encryption algorithms from the ground up (see things like the Clipper Chip and RSA's relationship with the NSA). With things like video, photo, audio, and liturgical surveilance, the data is largely out in the open (or simply purchased from their hosting platforms, leading to social media and adtech companies like Facebook and Google being defense contractors by nature) and does not need to be decrypted (in most cases) - rather, it needs to be correlated. This is a great task for machine learning because that's what the field has largely been engineered to do for the last 60 years, but it relies so, so, so heavily on having data to both train on and use in its practice. Storage of all data is the perfect end-goal of a surveilance state. Storage requires data centers. Data centers of this calibre are effectively black sites in that they are nigh impenetrable in both practical and legal senses, and I'd wager many data centers host actual digital black sites simply due to their ubiquity as means of doing so coupled with the necessity of the hardware and facilities they provide that are needed for doing so. Theres really nothing that will ever be publicly available that would say "this data center has a hundred thousand SOTA GPUs in it that are doing gait recognition on every camera in every airport in the world in real time" versus "this data center is a bunch of tape machines that store everything ever recorded from every facsimilie of Room 641A[1]". 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now%2C_decrypt_later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now%2C_decrypt_later 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- leonidasrup 3mo agoHarvest Now Decrypt Later principle holds very well for intelligence work, the harvested information could be useful for very long time. You can see this in the long time intervals specified for Declassification of classified documents. "Executive Order 13526 establishes the mechanisms for most declassifications, within the laws passed by Congress.[1] The originating agency assigns a declassification date, by default 25 years. After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States "Decrypt Later" should generalized to "Use Later", many recordings are useful without decryption, just from the metadata you can establish who, when communicated. Identification of relations between persons, building of social graphs, is the basic of intelligence work. Much of this relationship analysis can be done just from metadata. One example of such analysis is the NSA Co-Travel Analytics "CO-TRAVELER does not simply collect location information. It creates a portrait of travel times and people who crossed paths, revealing our physical interactions and relationships. The cell site information goes beyond email and phone calls and ordinary telephony data, allowing the U.S. government to know who we are with in-person and where. This is information that would be impossible to collect using traditional law enforcement methods. " https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/meet-co-traveler-nsas-cell-phone-location-tracking-program https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/meet-co-traveler-nsas-... https://www.eff.org/files/2013/12/11/20131210-wapo-cotraveler_overview.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/2013/12/11/20131210-wapo-cotravele...
- shit_game 3mo agoWell put; the scope of usefulness of surveilance data lies well beyond what is in that data itself, but how it relates to other data. You don't necessarily need to decrypt data to distill value from it, as its metadata (location, datetime, medium, etc.) is also (and potentially more) useful when related with other metadata. Storing this data is also a monumental task, given the fidelity of records that many consumer devices create, store, and upload.
- DeepSeaTortoise 3mo agoIMO you highly underestimate the amount of processing and storage video surveillance requires. There is just no good way to determine if you took that pen or made the newly illegal handgesture towards the wrong person 12 years ago unless you have enough storage to keep all the footage around and the processing power to search through it or prepare it for new types of queries in reasonable time. Also, have you considered AI being necessary to fill in for missing surveillance footage if the cameras are failing (the ruling class)? E.g. the whole Epstein (PR) disaster could have been avoided if the cameras could have been kept running and the footage post-processed in time.
- michaelt 3mo agoVideo-processing AI can be very flexible in its demands. Even if a camera supports 4k 60fps video, the 'edge AI' can downscale the input to 224x224 2fps and use a small network. Often the 'edge AI' just needs to detect humans/cars/pets and trigger saving some footage to an SD card/turning on a light. It's not the end of the world if it misses some things or raises false alarms sometimes. And if you buy a Reolink on Amazon expecting it to be able to recognise a face from 20 yards away, you'll be disappointed.
- rolph 3mo agoif you can actually simulate a stock market with fidelity, i believe that would be a distinct advantage. probably not short trading, but investigating leveraging positions may be worth it.
- protocolture 3mo agoI think like 30 - 40% of all the announced projects turned out to be financially viable. Possibly less. Conversely I see heaps of already in progress data center builds and upgrades tacking AI on as the purpose as just PR to sell colo.
- peer2pay 3mo agoI’m not too deep into the matter but don’t they all have to wait in the interconnection queue first anyway? My understanding is that that alone will take some years
- bpodgursky 3mo agoMost serious projects are building onsite power generation using natural gas to avoid this.
- copper4eva 3mo agoI happen to know some people who work for a company that helps build data centers. Business is booming for them, lots of projects all over the country (USA). So just to answer the straight up question of if they're actually getting built, yes they certainly are.
- hylaride 3mo agoKevin O’Leary is a grifter and he should be completely ignored. He literally got rich conning HP (though they were stupid for going ahead with it). That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.
- quickthrowman 3mo agoI thought he got rich conning Mattel to buy The Learning Company in 1999? They paid $3.5B for it and gave it away a year later. Then there was a lawsuit with a $100M+ settlement. Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.
- hylaride 3mo agoYou're right, I misremembered. HP was conned by a British guy named Mike Lynch.
- usrusr 3mo agoMisleading title: they are using eminent domain to seize land for power lines to data centers. (emphasis mine) This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.
- SuperNinKenDo 3mo agoActually, strictly speaking, it's /more/ debatable. Using eminent domain to seize land for the data centre itself gets a much more generally negative reaction, while seizing it for the purpose of infrastructure to supply said datacentre - and therefore, at least arguably, alleviate strain on the infrastructure used by everyone else - has more nuance and more room for debate.
- throwaway667555 3mo agoData centers increase strain on the grid, so their supply lines do too.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoData centers are a fixed load with on-site backup generators that can be used to shed load when the grid is stressed. Grids actually like that sort of thing. It lets them use more cheap renewables.
- inigyou 3mo agoThat makes no sense. Building new grid increases strain on the grid? No, it reduces strain, that's why they're doing it.
- throwaway667555 3mo agoWithout explanation, you think power plants aren't "the grid" that's being strained?
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/dUoBM https://archive.ph/dUoBM
- toofy 3mo agoi definitely have internal debates on the idea of eminent domain and the nuances of wether i think its ok or not. that said, i think i lean to it’s absolutely not ok to use eminent domain when the receivers of the benefits of the taken property are primarily one private industry and its owners. i’d probably more often be ok with it if the benefits were mostly limited to being widely distributed to the people of that locality/region. even then i go back and forth but i know for sure that plays a major part in how i see it.
- pegasus 3mo agoI feel the same. When those large datacenter projects were being considered, the necessity for building new power lines should have been included in the ask. Instead they built the centers, then "notice" the system is straining and stick the public with the bill and local communities with the consequences. Classic "privatize profits and socialize risks".
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoEvery consumer of electricity had to have power lines installed to their building in order to get electricity. They all then pay in proportion to how much electricity they use. The electric bill of a data center is large. It already includes the cost of building and maintaining power lines and generating power and everything else, because they all do, since that's what electric bills pay for. In general the problem is the power company, having received a large new customer and therefore a lot of new revenue, who wants to stuff it in their pocket instead of using it to upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
- sokoloff 3mo agoIsn’t the entire point of this power line project to “upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand”?
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoPeople are looking for any excuse to complain about data centers right now. Building transmission lines is bad because you're taking peoples land; not building transmission lines is bad because there isn't enough existing capacity. The first one is obviously preferable but when you're looking for an excuse it works out either way. What the complainers (i.e. the media companies) actually want is for the AI companies to stop letting people use AI to answer questions they used to read media articles to answer.
- Animats 3mo agoThis could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology. China has something of the same problem. The cheap power sources are in the northwest, and the big loads are in the southeast. So China has long million-volt UHV DC lines.
- 9dev 3mo agoAnd why not build data centers where the energy is?
- mschuster91 3mo agoLatency.
- rapidaneurism 3mo agoDoes it matter for training?
- bell-cot 3mo agoI'd assume that site selection managers understand how recommending "only useful for training" locations might impact their careers.
- api 3mo agoDoesn’t matter for training or most AI use cases. We are talking tens of ms latency here. I’m gonna guess availability of employees may matter more.
- inigyou 3mo agoOnce built, the DC has like, ten employees. Nine security guards and a part-time on-site technician.
- Frieren 3mo agoI am all for Communism and giving more priority to projects that help all society. But this is not it. It would help if the power grid was public property, thou. It would help if the power grid was build so the majority of citizens profit. It would help if the power grid was build for someone else than big tech. Meanwhile building railroads is impossible. Could we convince AI companies to build their datacenters on trains? USA would have in a few years the largest train network in the world.
- throwaway742 3mo agoThe rare HN commie. I'm aware of one other one besides you and myself.
- thrance 3mo agoNotice how when it comes to the interests of Capital, suddenly regulations or NIMBYs are rendered powerless. Building homes and infrastructure? Impossible. Building datacenters that will be obsolete in 4 years and abandoned just to fuel a speculation bubble? Yessir! Immediately, sir!
- elzbardico 3mo agoFrankly I stopped caring about it. The current system we live in is unsustainable and on the verge of breaking. We're headed towards something far worse than 1929, and there's nothing we can do to stop this train. I started to believe this when snapshot had their IPO value at something like 5 Exxons or 24 General Motors, but was primed for this belief working on energy and carbon credit derivative markets during the early 2010s, an experience that made me start believing it is all a fucking casino. Now, I just amuse myself watching the insanity.
- shimman 3mo agoYou should care and do more. It's honestly sad to look at the destruction of your community and do nothing about it. There are plenty of groups that could use your help, go help them. Be part of something instead of an observer.
- il-b 3mo agoIndeed, suing “the Capital” is more costly and difficult.
- gwittebolle 3mo ago[dead]
- avazhi 3mo agoThe irony of this article that was originally posted completely free on The Conversation being stuck behind a Fortune paywall is a bit much. https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-data-center-infrastructure-284061 https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-yo...
- dang 3mo agoOk, we've switched to that link from https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-public-use/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu... above. Thanks!
- petesergeant 3mo agoflagged per the highly misleading title
- arjie 3mo agoThat seems perfectly reasonable. Eminent domain for power lines is about the most reasonable use of the tool. This kind of thing is what it’s there for.
- Anoian 3mo agoFor private companies building ai data centers that the communities don't want?
- bvcp 3mo agotell me again why ai datacenters in space make no sense
- black6 3mo agoHeat rejection.
- Tangurena2 3mo agoAlong with lack of cooling, the cost to launch hardware means that "servers in space" can never recover startup costs.
- delecti 3mo agoCosmic rays, launch costs, relative impossibility of maintenance, difficulty of heat dispersal, added latency, interconnect interference, no way to recycle when decommissioning. Or we could build a power line.
- downrightmike 3mo agoIt would blot out the sky, ~30,000 acres per Gigawatt
- UltraSane 3mo agoOpposition to eminent domain would be a lot less if the government had to pay say 10x market value.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoA few alternative sources https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-public-use/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-data-center-infrastructure https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/when-can-a-power-compan... https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/policy/data-center-eminent-domain-land-conflict https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/policy/data-center-eminent... Last one appears to be generated using AI, with no attribution to the original author