How to stop a data center in your backyard

https://lataco.com/stop-sgv-data-center-building

by cdrnsf • 3 months ago

48 31 3 months ago

dorksquad• 3 months ago

most people have no idea where their apps come from. they think it all happens on their phone. this is why we can't have nice things.

achierius• 3 months ago

We aren't building dozens of new datacenters to host more webapps.

wsve2• 3 months ago

We can't have nice things because people don't want power hungry polluting data centers in their backyards?

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”.

At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.

amluto2• 3 months ago

Or… allow it, but tax it appropriately, don’t give any subsidies, and actually require that the operators deal with the negative externalities (noise, including subsonic noise, effects on utility pricing, etc).

It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

You would think and I’m definitely with you on your method.

slg3• 3 months ago

I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.

RhysU• 3 months ago

It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them.

That would imply that increased demand strictly decreases prices, no?

Given fixed supply, no dice.

To expand supply, one would use incrementally more expensive mechanisms to generate the incremental supply. (Because, why wouldn't you already be generating via the cheapest supply?) Either all existing customers would pay the same and the new customer would pay the higher rate OR smear the incremental costs across everyone. Prices might hold steady under the former choice but they would not decrease.

Is the idea that the new customer would unlock some better generation capabilities through capital investment? Something not already incentivized by the distributed grid?

Or is the idea that one should soak the new customer to subsidize the existing ones? Maybe rejigger some pricing tiers to push more of the existing customers into lower tiers while charging the new customer more. My guess is you're proposing this last option. I otherwise can't see how to square your suggestion with supply vs demand.

twoodfin2• 3 months ago

I’m just spitballing here, but how about a commercial property tax?

ofjcihen3• 3 months ago

Unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee that any of that is actually used to offset any of the negatives these things bring with them.

arjie• 3 months ago

There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park.

I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.

0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines

cucumber37328422• 3 months ago

The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.

tptacek2• 3 months ago

I live in a muni where virtually all development is done under variance, so I'm not sure what you mean here; "peasants" get stuff all the time, in fact, my guess is most of what gets decided on is "peasants" getting stuff.

(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)

ianm218• 3 months ago

In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.

ButlerianJihad2• 3 months ago

You would be surprised! Here's a fun pastime: pull up your Google Maps and scan through any McMansion district or SFH subdivision. Count how many independent businesses pop up in residential zones and at residential addresses! Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)

I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.

Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?

cucumber37328422• 3 months ago

Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)

Most of those are just addresses for businesses elsewhere. The landscaper is not going to register his business to the fenced dirt lot he parks everything, he's gonna register it to where he gets mail.

I'm well aware of what you can and can't do I own commercial real estate.

The government would love nothing more than to get a pound of flesh out of home notaries and the like but the political will isn't really there.

zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?

You say that like the regulations and it's peddlers aren't the ones in the wrong. If you're not harming your neighbors

The burden of proof should be on the government, none of this "well someone could do something that undermines public health despite the fact that doing so runs counter to their interest on any timeline longer than a week" bullshit that underpins nearly all existing municipal regulation.

tptacek2• 3 months ago

Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.

_--__--__• 3 months ago

I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).

slg3• 3 months ago

which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America

Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.

bluepeter• 3 months ago

Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.

PearlRiver• 3 months ago

Do you want to live next to one? Or do you think that honor should go to poor people?

Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...

karmakurtisaani• 3 months ago

Rich people don't send their kids to wars or live next to their factories. Those are the rules.

goldcountry• 3 months ago

If you had a data center in your backyard you'd change your mind on this one suuuuuper fast.

slg3• 3 months ago

AI is on track to become the next Concorde

A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?

drivingmenuts• 3 months ago

If you're wealthy, it's not a problem because you probably won't have a data center next to you. If you're poor, you're screwed.

Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.

We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.

Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.

But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.

Karrot_Kream• 3 months ago

You can make this argument for any industrial building.

twoodfin2• 3 months ago

NoVA is one of the richest areas of the entire country and is loaded with data centers.

wsve2• 3 months ago

We as a society should weight the cost/benefits of new technologies like this. What is the actual benefit of gigantic AI data centers? Is that worth the costs of the data centers to the power grid

How to stop a data center in your backyard

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