Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

https://www.tmj4.com/news/racine-county/microsoft-pulls-plug-on-plans-for-244-acre-data-center-in-caledonia-after-community-pushback

by cdrnsf • 2 months ago

180 184 2 months ago

tmj4.com

marticode• 2 months ago

Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web.

(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

kogasa240p• 2 months ago

Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents. Posted and last updated

VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward

“Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.

The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land.

Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback

The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties.

47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News

Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin.

The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.”

TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement:

    “Nothing official has been submitted to the Village regarding their pending application, and have no comment until such time.”

- Todd Willis, Village Administrator

Resident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news. PRESCOTT BALCH TMJ4 Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area.

"We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said.

Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article.

"I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated. Nancy Pierce TMJ4 News Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia.

Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia.

As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process.

"I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community."

"There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."

isodev2• 2 months ago

It's amazing how after all these years, tech world still believes it's a good idea to sell the entrance to their websites and services to the same bouncer. Cloudflare not in the mood for your IP/ISP/Country? Tough cookies.

llm_nerd2• 2 months ago

In this case a site is geoblocking. It's an affiliate station is Wisconsin, serving up local news. Sites have been using things like MaxMind and blanket blocking entire regions long before Cloudflare.

If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.

dylan6044• 2 months ago

I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.

deely3• 2 months ago

And don't forget about kids safety!

PunchyHamster2• 2 months ago

nah they will be selling their service to both hackers and their targets

somenameforme• 2 months ago

The site's also blocked for me, also on a normal residential IP. Making your site inaccessible for people out of fear that somebody might make it inaccessible for people feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded.

Dylan168072• 2 months ago

The better solution to blocking entire continents is probably doing nothing.

For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.

sph• 2 months ago

How many small websites served by Cloudflare risk being DDOS'd? How many small website owners would incur serious loss of livelihood if they are DDOS'd for a few days? Is DDOS risk so important that the web needs a protection racket?

If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence

DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.

Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.

The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket

How do you not even see the irony of this?

bshaughn• 2 months ago

Websites should have a lean markdown or .txt page for each human friendly webpage. A lot of the surge in bots is because of LLMs. Its insane that a technical documentation web page can use 200MB + of memory, when the core information I care about is << 1 MB of text. at the path of least resistance for many people is to have claude code hit 20 of such pages.

This is something that would be perfect for cloudflare to host and sell as a service - static web pages via their CDN network.

I do not work in web development, so im sure there are plenty of details im ignorant of, but the TLDR of "how to fight accidental DDOS because of AI tooling " is make it easier for them to get the content they want.

sandeepkd• 2 months ago

Makes me wonder if the company protecting against the DDOS would have motivation to encourage or facilitate the DDOS efforts too, makes them the protection racket itself.

If DDOS is really the problem we want to solve then it would be awesome if one can do it without looking into the packet. SSL terminating at some centralized third party provider is way too much power.

pocksuppet3• 2 months ago

Just host the site. Are you expecting to get DDoS'd? Why? And what will be the consequences if you are?

Someone said it's like protecting yourself from stabbings by banning kitchen knives, but it's more like protecting yourself from stabbings by wearing thick rubber armor at all times, that also happens to be filled with spy cameras somebody else owns. It's a bit of an overreaction to a very rare threat, don't you think?

PunchyHamster2• 2 months ago

block was enabled by site owner, not cloudflare. If they used something else they'd just blanked block ASN IP blocks

zinekeller• 2 months ago

And as stated by others, it's about not complying with GDPR et al. Heck, this is not even Cloudflare, it's AWS Cloudfront!

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

I hit this a lot with Firefox VPN and it's ridiculous

sammy2255• 2 months ago

You could use a search engine to find their contact information

theflyinghorse• 2 months ago

I don't understand why cloudflare is loved by tech people. They ARE breaking the web.

throwaway2037• 2 months ago

Real question: What is the alternative to prevent DDoS? The killer app is that their DDoS prevention is free for small sites.

Mickelby• 2 months ago

If you run a website then you quickly learn that 99% of traffic is bots/spam/scam/ai, and will overwhelm your resources. You can block it with the click of a (Cloudflare) button. There is nothing to consider here.

arjie• 2 months ago

What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset.

This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.

delfinom• 2 months ago

Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing.

Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.

bobthepanda• 2 months ago

Also for a large enough utility hookup you will need to coordinate with the utility and or government since you can’t just plop down a large consumer on any old power line or pipe.

thewebguyd5• 2 months ago

Zoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc.

It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.

cucumber37328423• 2 months ago

The community hearing is the easiest and cheapest part if your use is mundane.

The government will still screw you out of hundreds of thousands (mostly in the form of "pay these other people four figures for study X and plan Y" type requirements) to even get to that point though

toast03• 2 months ago

Depending on things, you might enter a land purchase (or lease) contract that's contingent on issuance of a building permit.

But a seller would probably prefer to sell without contingency, so what terms are available depends on market conditions.

Title insurance for residential real estate may sometimes cover properties that are unbuildable due to unsatisfiable permit requirements.

All told, it's easier as a buyer if you purchase an existing structure that was built under permits and is currently in use under appropriate occupancy permits.

delusional• 2 months ago

From what I can tell Microsoft hasn't purchased the land yet. It's apparently owned by WE energies as part of the power plant next door.

thewebguyd5• 2 months ago

My employer went through a similar process, not for a data center but for a large recycling yard/center. We had to buy the land first, and it was basically unproductive for 2.5 years of mostly waiting for permits, and it was already zoned industrial so no zoning changes were needed.

The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to take that long it but a real strain on the business.

So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.

cbdevidal• 2 months ago

Fun fact: Large businesses are often tapped to write the laws intended to target large businesses. The process is called “model legislation.” Fox and henhouse.

nixgeek11• 2 months ago

It’s unusual to buy the land and take a gamble on its utility, at least whenever datacenter construction is involved. Purchasing parties are risk averse to this exact scenario and work hard to craft contracts that reduce risk.

Often the choices are —

1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is your example. But problematically all permitting applications are typically public record, so when you fail, the land can’t be sold on to someone else as if that didn’t happen, any sophisticated buyer will know the exact issues the city/county had with your usage. Land often transacts onward at firesale prices under these circumstances.

2. $/acre for land is bid upon at a substantial premium reflecting the future value as a datacenter, it remains under contract for potentially years pending outcome of approvals, then it transacts. Permitting being denied usually results in either no money changing hands or a small termination fee reflecting the carrying cost of the land during that period. If permitting works out the seller of land walks away very happy as the $/acre was extremely lucrative.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

I’ve had multiple friends try to start businesses that got stuck on this: You can’t really get permits until you have the property and start drawing up plans.

For simple businesses like a retail store in a location that has other retail it’s not too risky to bet that you’ll be approved, too.

For businesses with unique needs or that happen to be in the public crosshairs, you’re putting a lot at risk in the process.

The process favors big companies and developers who have established relationships and “connections” with the planning boards.

The situation is even wilder in some other countries, both more and less corrupt than the average US municipality. In some places you’re not getting a permit at all without a sizable bribe, or having an in with the planning board.

In my city one of the aspiring developers tried to run an expensive political campaign to get a family member into an office that could have helped with their approvals. People caught on and didn’t like it one iota.

nixgeek11• 2 months ago

It’s true it costs money to then hopefully make it. :)

Architecture, civil engineering, and other design and permitting fees can easily be 7–10% of the overall cost of smaller projects. Even in large projects they’re often 4-5% or more, and the number of billable hours for complex impervious surface and stormwater management adds up fast, as do engineering stamped plans for structural and other factors.

Most cost here is also incurred fairly early before you have any vertical construction done — Phase 2 in a program after land acquisition. So you feel like you’re spending a ton on paperwork and you can’t see anything yet.

You CAN spend a bit of money even before land acquisition on quick feasibility studies but in U.S. terms for something like a residential, small commercial or light industrial project every parcel you go “I like that, can it work?” you are dropping $15-50k during a 45-120 feasibility period. Should it 100% not work out you are NOT getting reimbursed that by the selling party. You’re out the money. Even within 90 days you may find some uncertainties like SEPA approval won’t close before you have to say deal or no deal on the parcel acquisition. This is quite unlike massive companies doing business where the land may not change hands until essentially every approval is locked in (but should it not work out the buyer may be out millions in engineering fees paid to try and make it work).

Borrowing to buy land and then borrowing more to build something is also treated very differently by most lenders. It carries tremendous uncertainty versus you buying a preexisting lot and structures which they know how to value. That’s fundamentally something that causes unwillingness to lend, or changes the rates and down payment or security terms. In contrast with a conforming mortgage for a SFR (single family residence) at 6%, borrowing to build (a construction loan) can be 10-14% APR, often secured via personal guarantee and other assets you possess, and then you have to convert to a personal or commercial mortgage after you complete building what you wanted.

Borrowing to buy the land is even more complicated again — you very often must be able to pay cash for land, and then just borrow to do the construction. Borrowing for both especially with limited assets to secure against will always be a polite “Sorry; we can’t help.”

bearjaws• 2 months ago

Here in Orlando two large builders bought about 90% of downtowns empty lots (and several older buildings) promising new high rises in 2022, then threw in the towel after evicting all the tenants and now most of Church street station is completely empty. Of course local government had put nothing in the agreement about time frame of completion, what happens if the builder gives up, etc.

So now, all of it sits abandoned, no construction started, and now its not even worth building as they claim "down town is dead".

This is likely the fate of that land, a write off until its so valuable they can sell it to someone else.

beau_g• 2 months ago

A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then you can sell or redevelop later. Now I am expecting a spinoff to Mister Inference and Quick Flops as these sprawling networks of carwashes turn into data centers in 2030

vel0city• 2 months ago

I would imagine car washes to be one of the more difficult kinds of businesses to operate just to hold a lot. You often need a lot of work on drainage and permeability to ensure you're not contaminating local water systems with your car wash.

Storage though, yeah, that makes sense.

burnte• 2 months ago

SMaller business would find land already zoned for what they want. That makes it much less of a fight. These large companies find the land they want, then fight governments to allow the code and zoning changes to allow them to do what they want. It's a backwards process, but they think it's fine because they can afford it, and don't stop to realize that if they stopped letting execs make the decisions of where it goes, then a facility professional can find better land that they could get up and operational much faster.

I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.

I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.

Dig1t• 2 months ago

Yes it's called zoning, it's why we have a housing shortage in the USA. It makes building new things nearly impossible. It's also why none of the homes in Los Angeles that burnt down in massive fires a few years ago are being rebuilt, and likely won't be rebuilt for decades (if at all).

thereisnospork• 2 months ago

Pretty much. The discretionary nature of permitting, and other add-ons like CEQA, pose an enormous, and worse, unpredictable, burden on attempting to start a business in many places.

It'd be one thing if the requirements were merely onerous, but the discretionary nature adds corruption greatly favoring incumbents, the deep pocketed, and those willing to disregard the rules (start-ups with low capital requirements).

Never mind the timeline of these processes. Permitting can take 18-24 months, as can items like basic utility upgrades (adding 480V service, for instance, to an existing building can be an 18 month ~quarter million dollar endeavor.)

cucumber37328423• 2 months ago

The permitting authority gets to pretend like it's not discretionary because the process has some "if we exercise out discretion to say no at this point then you sue us" thing to it that only megacorps with a legal team can afford to use

teeray• 2 months ago

It helps if the land is currently an eyesore and you’re the first to do something with it.

delecti• 2 months ago

My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.

How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.

jeffbee11• 2 months ago

Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.

dqv2• 2 months ago

Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that.

You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces.

Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation.

Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area.

If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same.

The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.

jubilanti• 2 months ago

I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia.

manarth2• 2 months ago

That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size.

The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).

As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…

244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.

nixgeek11• 2 months ago

Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...

Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.

A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.

Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.

dogcomplex• 2 months ago

It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.

ninalanyon• 2 months ago

How much parking does a data centre need, and why is it not placed underneath the building, underground? Why do cars have to take up so much land?

anvuong• 2 months ago

10,000 square meters sound suspiciously small for a datacenter, even more so if you have to account for supporting facility? Maybe a small one? it's just 100m by 100m, which is smaller than most Walmart Supercenter.

LeFantome2• 2 months ago

us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each.

So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.

Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.

nixgeek11• 2 months ago

AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA.

I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…

All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.

James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —

https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...

mapt• 2 months ago

Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.

tptacek8• 2 months ago

Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.

CPLX10• 2 months ago

Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.

Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.

Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.

jeffbee11• 2 months ago

Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome.

Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.

The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...

trollbridge3• 2 months ago

Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.

I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.

If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.

jeffbee11• 2 months ago

I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.

thewebguyd5• 2 months ago

provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.

Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.

parineum2• 2 months ago

This water usage meme needs to die. Although, it is nice to have an indicator for people who believe whatever they told without trivial verification.

RajT88• 2 months ago

I'm seeing a lot of pushback against data centers in my town, building where there is currently cornfields.

I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year.

Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it).

Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here.

Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.

We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so.

So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.

insane_dreamer2• 2 months ago

"a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good

Danox2• 2 months ago

This is the last stand for Satya Narayana Nadella Copilot has to work…

nixgeek11• 2 months ago

Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor.

Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.

It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.

It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.

energy123• 2 months ago

One of the rare cases where nimbys can't do damage because the hyper scalers will (and are) building their data centers across MENA, South Asia and SEA where they're welcomed with generous tax breaks and incentives.

Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!

expedition322• 2 months ago

Welcomed by corrupt politicians perhaps the locals not so much.

Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.

866-RON-0-FEZ• 2 months ago

The data center would have been built in this scene

You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.

rbanffy• 2 months ago

For a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands, but I guess the name fell in disuse when the Roman Empire fell...

Danox2• 2 months ago

Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.

simonebrunozzi• 2 months ago

Are you sure? AFAIK, Satya did a great job from the point of view of a shareholder - +1,200% from 2014 to today [0]

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...

Ampersander• 2 months ago

That was then. Today the stock is trading at a lower price than in May 2024. Google is up over 100% in that time.

shimman• 2 months ago

Not that impressive when MSFT has a monopoly in several verticals that allows them to subsidize their many failures.

thewebguyd5• 2 months ago

They're already backtracking on, at least, the consumer Copilot being shoved everywhere in Windows. I think Nadella is already on his way out though (voluntarily). Judson Athoff is already taking over as "CEO of Commercial Businesses" so Nadella can be closer to engineering, which he's said he misses.

ralph84• 2 months ago

One of the emails that came out in the Musk v. OpenAI trial was Nadella in 2022 saying he wanted to own the entire AI stack. Four years later Microsoft is no closer to owning any part of the AI stack. Complete fumble of the bag.

3eb7988a16632• 2 months ago

Notably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.

pathartl• 2 months ago

It's about 15 miles north. Microsoft is already building a data center on some of the land that Foxconn didn't use

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

(2025) OP.

simianwords4• 2 months ago

I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them.

Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.

This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.

saulpw• 2 months ago

If it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.

simianwords4• 2 months ago

The Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population).

This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.

These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.

But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.

toast03• 2 months ago

Post construction, data centers don't have a lot of employment, so you don't get much income tax or in-community spending from employees.

But, companies put a lot of capital equipment in them, and capital equipment accrues property tax, so there should be taxes paid from that.

1shooner• 2 months ago

Do you see coal mining towns as a model to pursue?

simianwords4• 2 months ago

Yes they contributed enormous growth without which USA could not have been a dominant power. There are better alternatives now however.

dgellow2• 2 months ago

But a datacenter doesn’t employ that many people, compared to mines. To develop a town you need to give a bunch of people a job, build small commerces, invest in the local infrastructure, so a real local economy can sustain itself. There is none of that with datacenters

dmix• 2 months ago

I'd say they should come build them in Canada instead since our energy is cheaper, but anti-industrial development policy and NIMBYism is even more embedded than America, which is probably why no one is bothering.

SecretDreams• 2 months ago

I think it's less this and more they're encouraged to build in America over Canada.

LogicFailsMe• 2 months ago

At what point was this datacenter going to benefit the residents beyond a trifling number of jobs in exchange for draining local resources for pennies on the dollar Microsoft should have paid? If the tech companies can't make these things into genuine win/win scenarios, then don't let them build anything, they're currently as useless to local communities as stadiums except you don't even get to watch games in them.

Absolutely 100% force them to make a genuine case for them and to sign contracts demanding they live up to their obligations. Otherwise, it's more evidence why billionaires need to write and sign some reality checks on their dragon piles.

Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

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