I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?

I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.

How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?

One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.

Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.

That absence of particles also means it is a nearly perfect insulator, with almost no heat transferred from the station to space by contact with space. No convection either.

That leaves cooling by thermal radiation, which is not a very good method.

the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.

and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.

This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.

I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?

Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.

What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?

Are you trolling?

that's the way i see this bet as well.

your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect - its the musical chairs theory of markets.

You sure about that?

https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/21/1/19/157439...

it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said money into this venture that obviously won't work. why does he waste his time into a venture that obviously won't work? who knows

Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter than him" there nine years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020

> It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt

> And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal

That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.

Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they incur on the system.

To install thd infrastducture everyones bill goes up.

There is nothing grass roots about “AI will cause drought and famine” nonsense coming from the infotainment content mills. I don’t blame anyone for keeping their work out of the hostile press.

Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.

Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.

So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.

The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.

If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.

India has has a substantial number of acre users.

See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential election. Reputations were on full display.

It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.

Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.

But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.

Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.

Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).

Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.

Whether the people who believe it are going to experience consequences in future isn't relevant to that.

I'm an immigrant to the US - currently looking to emigrate again for obvious reasons! - and I've done a good amount of walking or taking public transit. Walking on the shoulder of strips (i.e. highways with traffic lights and shopping) is not pleasant, but it's doable. Crossing those strips is usually possible at traffic lights.

The wildest thing is that even in smallish towns where you might expect that walking would be supported, it isn't. Town planners generally seem not to consider it at all, at best you get some sidewalks outside shopping areas and then everything else the best you get is a shoulder, and the worst is nothing at all so you're just in the road with the cars.

The US is literally, collectively insane, and what it's going through now is just a natural consequence of that.

AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.

You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.

It’s evaluating proposal by the words of the applicant alone.

In addition to exaggeration on resumes, people tend to not include inconvenient stuff. Reputation is definitely part of the merit.

The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.

I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?

Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).

I would get value from stealing, I don't steal from people. The argument or question isn't about if it has value to some people, the question is, does the value to some people outweigh the costs that are imposed on others.

Those lists are the companies marking their own homework and congratulating themselves as PR, AKA "greenwashing". They can do that just fine by spinning a single metric of their choice where they do less-badly than their pick of mean, median, and mode of whoever else they want to compare themselves against, they don't actually need to be genuinely eco-friendly at anything.

Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto, they’re just speaking into the void as far as the company is concerned.

If anything these should be examples on the failure of how these resources are being sold and good opportunity to build a better system.

These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.

But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.

Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.

The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.

And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).

Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".

It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".

At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol