Hi. I live in Loudoun County and work for a hyperscaler data center. I want to clear up a lot of misinformation. Amaa. I do have to respect my NDA.
First, data centers absolutely employ hundreds of people. It depends on the kind of data center. An edge site that is for interconnects only needs a couple of people, but a core site with between 20 to 100 megawatts absolutely has around 100 employees once you include breakfix/smart hands technicians, critical environment techs, cable techs, electrical engineers, managers, and other support staff. AI data centers fall in or exceed that range.
Another issue is the taxes are usually on the computers themselves as property taxes. This is actually gargantuan, and make up about 45% of Loudoun County’s operating budget. Usually, there are no taxes on the building or property itself since the computers are worth more and are taxed at a higher rate. That said, then COVID happened, and decommissions and procurement grinded to a halt. Computers are depreciating assets, so as they sharply dropped in value but stayed in production, the county had a budget shortfall for '21 snd '22.
Another parroted point that is related is that “taxes aren’t getting reduced for residents”. This is actually untrue. The tax rate has dropped from $1.20 to $0.80 over the last decade, but the issue is that property values have skyrocketed. In addition, one of the VA colleges found no link between data centers’ proximity to residential properties and those properties decreasing in value in NoVA.
Now, it may seem that I’m “pro-data center”. I am not. I’ve worked in them for 7 years. There are many things they could do to be better neighbors with everyone. However, a lot of the anti-data center sentiment is manufactured outrage. Dominion Power doesn’t want to spend money on infrastructure and preventative maintenance; I’ve watched 4 transformers on my street and neighboring street blow in the last year. News companies fear AI and search engines replacing clicks and ad revenue. Golf courses don’t want to have their water use compared to data centers, cause its not even close to the same ballpark.
Is air and noise pollution an issue? Yes. However, perhaps Dominion Power should make good on its promises and hook up Vantage 2; the data center in Sterling that runs off of its own gas turbines because Dominion told them they can’t have any power after they completed the data center. It’s not like data centers are built with no promise of utilities; contracts were signed beforehand… Up to 10 years beforehand. Or when the substation in Leesburg caught fire, causing the 5 Microsoft data centers to run generators for a month while NOVEC failed to source transformer components after promising that they would be back up and running in 48 hours. The SCC then fined Microsoft millions for breaking a rule they wouldn’t have to if the power companies didn’t overpromise and underdeliver. Forget a moratorium, there’s no more power in LoCo.
I put my money where my mouth is. I bought 30 solar panels and a battery system. Dominion Power tried to steal from residents already, trying to change the net metering rate from 1:1 to 1:0.15. This would mean that they would pay me 15% of what I pay them for each kilowatt generated and sent back to the grid. Thankfully, the SCC shot that down.
And they are pursuing a merger with NextEra Energy to form the largest regulated utility in the world… A company that large wouldn’t be regulated anymore.
GenAI is a whole new ballgame.
Can someone please explain to me how a building that employs like 20 people adds to a community? The extra taxes seem incredibly low compared to the cost of them too.
Extra taxes? I wish. Most of these city council are falling all over each other to give these assholes massive tax breaks to move in with, “hundreds of construction jobs.”
Fucking MBAs ruining everything with “next quarter thinking.”
The great part about this happening to the wealthy, is people are reporting on it…
If a data center goes near you, that means they use up all the utilities, so your taxes pay for more to be installed.
Then once they’re installed, that’s the best place for a new data center, until there aren’t utilities again.
Which means humans pay more taxes, utilities get built up again, and more data centers move in.
It’ll keep going till there’s not enough humans to pay for more infrastructure to be installed, then it will repeat in the next community.
There’s only “jobs” installing the utilities and building the centers, once it’s built they only need a handful of humans to run them. No jobs and a shit ton of data centers means housing prices plummet. Especially if the houses are expensive because that’s what the people making money wanted. No one wants a luxury home surrounded by data centers.
The best part about data centers is that for the most part, they’re going to overpopulate in the Red states, and make those places miserable, while the Blue states become too hostile to build, heavily regulate them, or ban them outright.
Let them suck the life out of states that deserve it.
You know that a bunch of people who didn’t want to be were sent to those states and are stuck there right?
Who? Why?
You are joking right?
Could you elaborate for the less informed?
You missed a major one. The Long Walk.
I don’t think those people are going to be complaining about datacenters, given that they’re all long dead.
i have news for you if you think there are going to be red states and blue states for much longer.
I’m not even sure what you’re implying, but apparently it’s unpopular.
I think they’re implying a violent authoritarian crackdown on anyone who doesn’t hew to the Trump Administration’s party line. Probably around the time that Trump refuses to leave office after the next presidential election. As nightmares go, that one isn’t quite as far-fatched as most of the world would like.
Let’s see if we have midterms first.
so’s trump, and yet here we are
What’s gonna be hilarious is when there’s a revolution in how training, storages and utilization of the models’ neural networks are understood and require drastically less computing power and these data centers get abandoned, companies collapse, an economic collapse analogous to the dotcom boom actually happens, but utilities remain high in cost and still no one can afford shit because the wealthy once against failed to invest in the right industries and future technology like renewables. We could be the world leader in renewables if we moonshot developing tech that relied on resources we actually have domestically and what we can trade responsibly without putting national security at risk, but instead we are still reliant on a dying fossil industry and have guaranteed a near future economic collapse.
but instead we are still reliant on a dying fossil industry
That’s no coincidence. Fossil fuel industry saw datacenter power needs was their way to stay relevant for years to come.
Yep, and that’s a big national security risk. We may have massive oil reserves and processing but it’s for light sweet crude and the us doesn’t have the heavy dark stuff we need presently, so without building the infrastructure to process what we have differently, including any liquefied natural gas, we would run out of stocks in 10-15 years should we get cut off globally for reasons of war or finding ourselves sanctioned for bad behaviors. It’s a gamble they’re willing to take, and it likely will pay off for the wealthy, and they won’t care if it fails for reasons I listed because they’re already wealthy and insulated somewhat from global events - but the less wealthy leaders who live within the US might not fare so well should it come to a breakdown of those systems and mass panic.
This will happen even before any further technology comes along as the AI business model is fundamentally flawed. They’re gambling on earning huge fortunes, but will earn peanuts as they can’t capture the value generated by AI. AI is just another commodity, and people will use the cheapest tool that does the job. They won’t care that company X spent 100s of billions of dollars on their frontier model when a free or cheap model elsewhere is good enough for the task. No customers are paying for that investment - just colossal debt piles and investors desperate to be in at the ground floor. The big AI companies are already well into nonsense circular deals passing each others IOUs with headline figures in the many billions. It’s all a slow motion car crash.
It could’ve been your brain but that’s apparently passé
Close enough. clapclapclapclap
I did. But no one will listen.
