Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas(en.ilsole24ore.com) |
Lombardy increases charges for the construction of data centres in green areas(en.ilsole24ore.com) |
Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.
So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.
As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.
[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)
EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that because it sounds better. Local municipalities should definitely charge significant land rents or zoning fees so that the community benefits. China has been very successful at this for decades.
EDIT: Very rough overview after some research, using Colossus 1 as reference, which is among the biggest GPU deployments. Not thoroughly verified, but it'll be around the right ballpark.
- Electricity: 150 MW live, with another 150 MW planned/studied. That is like adding a medium electric-arc steel mill or large chemical plant to the grid. A small standard power-plant can generate about that much.
- Land / space: About 217 acres and 785,000 sq ft. Footprint-wise, that is like a large factory campus or logistics park; much smaller than a mine, port, refinery, or industrial farm, but far beyond a normal commercial warehouse.
- Water: Roughly 1.3–3M gallons/day in public estimates. That is comparable to the consumptive water use of a small-to-mid steel plant or a large industrial cooling site; not refinery-scale, but locally significant.
- Air pollution: The servers are not the dirty part; the issue is on-site gas turbines/generators. That makes it more like a small gas peaker plant than a steel mill or chemical plant. Colossus 1 reportedly used up to 35 gas turbines before grid connection.
- Noise: Mainly cooling equipment, substations, batteries, turbines/generators. More like living near a substation or small power plant than near a mine, port, or metalworks.
- Traffic / logistics: Heavy during construction, then relatively light. Much less disruptive than a port, mine, farm, steel plant, or refinery, because there is no constant flow of ore, scrap, fuel, chemicals, crops, containers, or waste.
- Heat: Nearly all consumed electricity becomes heat. At 150–300 MW, the heat rejection is industrial-scale, closer to a small power station / large process plant than normal manufacturing.
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.
I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
[2]: https://earthjustice.org/case/xai-illegal-gas-power-plant-da...
[3]: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/n...
It would add low value-added jobs though (unskilled labor). Datacenters add high value-added jobs (skilled labor).
Only looking at the headcount is shortsighted imho.
In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits.
I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.
All of these create a ton of jobs in the local area and many of them provide massive advantages to the local area (except railway lines if you're not near a station I guess).
A sewage treatment plant may or may not be stinky, but I very much want to live in range of one so that my sewage gets treated. Similarly, living near a railway line means I can ride the train. Living near a landfill means that my trash can be managed at reasonable expense. Living near a military base adds huge potential economic value and nominally keeps me safe. Living near a giant AI inference or training facility? Meh -- I could use its services just as easily if it were 1000 miles away.
You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.
They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.
The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.
So there is little profit being taxed at the Datacenter/country Level.
I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.
Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.
the law addresses exactly this. it greatly overtaxes datacenter in green spaces and lowers taxes in former industrial areas.
Regarding whether it's a good development drive... I can tell you, most companies could save a shitload of money by buying a few pallets of machines and racking them in a... datacenter.
I see our monthly AWS bill, I highly doubt we'd be spending that in datacenter bills.
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
Italy isn't a particularly attractive place to run data centers for different reasons, starting from the very high cost of energy.
So they want them in other areas instead? Like next to residential area?
I'm not sure they understand the implications...
It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"
or... industrial areas?
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.
This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.
I would take vehicles in two directions. EV's where it makes sense and hyper efficient hybrid vehicles that emit clean exhaust and get 150+mpg to fill some EV gaps until battery tech progresses quite a bit more.
LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.
There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.
But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
"The selection of tier-2 metropolitan areas shows that overall, they are growing faster than market average. Madrid and Milan are clearly taking the lead and are both able to attract the biggest additional investments. It can safely be said that they are on their way to becoming additional tier-1 locations."
https://www.eudca.org/documents/content/ZlZXb4bRSRefaEVqya2I... (downloads a pdf)
> Trust in me
No, because being Italian doesn't mean you know anything about this. Most Italians think the primary Italian exports are mozzarella and tomatoes.
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
Sometimes you will need to do stuff even if energy is not cheap. Come on (I’m italian too)
I think you are discounting the speed at which solar is accelerating in southern Europe. Power is already pretty much free during the daytime on the Spanish and Italian grids, and grid-scale battery installations are starting to come online to spread that curve wider.
read the article:
> Lombardy alone accounted for 63% of the applications submitted throughout Italy.
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
> If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
I believe it has more to do with preserving the landscape that attracts so many tourists.
Solar farms in Italy faced resistance for the same reason.
It's not green politics.
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
But datacenters are hardly that? Sure, maybe whatever musk's doing with on-site gas turbines might qualify, but it's hardly representative of datacenters, which are probably closer to light industry or warehouses in terms of local impact.
Is that true though? If a Delaware corp is operating in most states, I believe they must file as a foreign corporation in that state; I'm surprised GAAP would not require them accruing some of this income to the locations that provided the work to do the income.
Or if we're above wet bulb climate conditions again, we just watch the newest algorithm invent stories for us built on the uncredited labor of real artists.
Physical infrastructure inputs and negative externalities.
For example: electrical grid strain, water table consumption for cooling, and local pollution/carbon footprints.
The highest skill job an AI datacenter adds locally is electrician or climate technician. And not many of those.
chatgpt has 900M weekly active users, so a significant fraction of the world population. Given that the user base probably skews towards rich countries, its proportion among the local population is probably even higher. On the other hand what do you think is the proportion of people who take trains, especially in the US? What about steel plants?
So if I drive to work then it's fair game to be NIMBY when they want to build a light rail station? You might say "but even if you don't use it, it's reducing traffic so you're still benefiting!", but if those kind of arguments are allowed, you can make similar arguments about how AI will make the whole country richer because of increased productivity or whatever.
In your examples, that'd be by increasing deterrence. Just like these taxes do.
You only get to have an opinion on data centers because politicians in Italy aren't directly impacted and have no skin in the game(no threats, international pressure, lobbying and bribes aimed their way). But if they did, I assure you your opinion wouldn't be taken into consideration on this matter and would be ignored.
Forget nukes, but like if Italians would like a referendum similar to Brexit, on stopping all illegal boat migration coming at them every year, then that opinion wouldn't be given a thought. You DO get a vote on data centers because politicians don't care and it's an easy populist win for them as another commenter here said.
You know what else is populism? Robbing the youth of money and giving it to the retirees as an unsustainable pay as you go pension system they will never get to see. Just because you call something populist to discredit it as being bad, doesn't mean it's not gonna happen.
For heating: imagine a 1km^2 campus. That’s 1e6 m^2, and peak daylight is around 1kW/m^2. So peak daylight on the campus is about 1GW. (Wow, just covering the whole campus with solar panels would be pretty awesome!) If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.
As for noise, there is no substantial noise emission inherent to the operation, so I expect it largely comes down to how hard the facility tries to mitigate accidental noise and how well local regulators enforce sound measurement and control. Consider a high-end Noctua or similar fan, compared to a super cheap fan of comparable RPM, flow, and static pressure — a 30dB difference in emitted sound is entirely plausible. The datacenter has some switching noise from handling its 1GW of power, but it also has lots and lots of fans and pumps.
An LLM informs me that 1kW of acoustic energy radiated into free air (no surfaces) is 79dB SPL, Z curve (unweighted), at a range of 1km. So if 1 part per million of the datacenter’s power consumption ends up as noise, it’s loud. There are all manner of corrections needed. For example, your ears’ sensitivity is much lower at non-peak-sensitivity frequencies. But the data center isn’t in free air, and the effect of the ground, the atmosphere under appropriate circumstances, and the height of the datacenter could easily dramatically increase the intensity at longish distances.
A lot of this boils down to large datacenters using immense amounts of power and that power being something you would prefer not to have redirected at you in any form.
Doesn't this comparison fall apart when you consider that the heat is going to be dissipated across a large area? The reason why stuff gets so hot during the day is that the surrounding areas also get heated, so there's nowhere for the heat to escape other than up. If only 1sq km is getting heated, and that's getting dissipated, the effect is going to be far less than your implied comparison of 2 suns. To bring it back to your example, a patch of payment in the sun (ie. 1kW/m^2) can get scorching hot. But in absolute terms it's less than the output of a space heater (typical one is 1.5KW), not even enough to keep a room warm.
A hairdryer pointed at me from 1m away running 24/7 will make me notably warmer. A hairdryer 20m away is probably unnoticeable. A 1GW datacenter is a lot of hairdryers. At some scale, there is probably a buoyancy effect such that cooler air will be drawn in near the surface, get heated, and convect upwards, so I could even believe that a monster datacenter would cool some surrounding areas. (The sun inland from the west coast in the US has this effect during certain seasons, and AIUI this is a good part of the reason that the areas very near the coast tend to be dramatically cooler than inland areas in the spring and early summer.)
There was a study posted here on this exact topic a few weeks back. The most they could measure was a little over 1 degree C near the datacenter.
> But the point is they suck up land and resources
Land use for a datacenter is kind of negligible. Even the largest data centers are barely a rounding error compared to all of the other commercial and industrial operations around me.
Like it's not even close.
> They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
For what it's worth, all of the data center projects I've looked up near me are being built in remote or industrial areas. It hasn't stopped the protestors, who are arranging for bus transport to get to the sites because they're so far away.
I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.
In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.
And these tech bros don't REALLY want to build out the infrastructure. All they want is tax cuts, cheap land and free power/water.
The locals ofcourse are supposed to prostrate themselves before the Emperor for this wonderful opportunity.
I used the paper's data to investigate some of their claims. The top figure shows the temperature in the area surrounding Google's Oklahoma data center, in the middle of the figure. I think you can clearly see that the effect is totally dominated by the nearby coal power station and its huge, black pile of slag.
https://observablehq.com/@jwb/data-center-temperature-effect...
The scene is roughly here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2154925,-95.3281217,13968m/d...
Edit: fixed notebook access. Sorry.