Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
Why does the local community need their take from that economic activity? What are they even providing? Are they providing land, electricity, and hardware for free to the data center?
Temporary/reckless construction jobs, community disruption, and higher energy costs are what most of us can expect unless more states crack down on this nonsense.
https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...
Texas is physically larger and 'business frienedly' so suspect they will be getting a lot more.
Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
It’s all fun and games until the cost of beef and oil skyrockets.
More likely he is going to make something like Landman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landman_(TV_series)#Renewable_...
story about a salt of the earth datacenter operator who manages the datacenter and people while spreading misinformation about the impact of datacenters on people.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.
They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.
I think it's reasonable to pump the brakes for a year (which is what they've done) and then see where things are in a year, even when there is just a risk to the local community. Worst case scenario, those businesses and data centers end up one year behind schedule, compared to the downsides, that seems acceptable to me.
> One-year construction ban will apply to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, official says
This is targeting "hyperscalers" or AI dcs. Non-AI datacenters consume well below this threshold.
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
New York heavily restricts construction and infrastructure projects of all kinds. The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.
NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of.
[1]. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/new-york-city-population...
2021 was an absolute disaster. There was a moment where the grid could have completely collapsed. But by some luck, the state avoided that.
Can they do that next time? Shall wait and see.
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
- Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.
Steven Miller has figured it out
Wont move the needle? Go ahead and build shit in your community, I'm happy its being kept out of mine. Stop trying to pretend like NY is trying to legislate the nation by maintaining its own front and backyard.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
</sarcasm>
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
Are you sure? Most of the objections I've seen center around environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing in the surrounding area. Both of these seem to be to be objectively measurable.
> the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states
What does "politically impoverished" mean? I'd say more "politically permissive" states would make more sense here. Red states are not impoverished of politics, they just have different politics.
Wall Street is gonna finance these projects and make their cut wherever the projects ultimately are. NY state is simply ensuring that no concrete batch plant in Oneonta accidentally gets rich along the way too,
It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible. The bond market for financing buildouts is looking shaky and even Amazon struggled there in its last go at loaning money to fuel the buildout. That doesn’t bode well for others.
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
Same with AI stuff. No you don’t need to be at the forefront of whatever is happening. No you won’t be left behind if that actually completely revolutionize the world, you can let the others try and fail to integrate LLMs in their systems. When it is eventually proven to boost ROI in a reliable way and AI vendors have actually figured out a reliable business model, it’s actually pretty simple to learn the technology and integrate in your existing infra
Perhaps the majority of people in Vermont want him to be vocal about it and he is simply doing his actual job.
AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
That goes against my personal experience. It's only people in this small tech bubble that hate it.
In the broader space people love it. I know plenty of people 50+ who use it as their search engine now, people who use it for relationship advice, my wife works with someone who claims to be dating an AI boyfriend (don't ask me how that works). And that's to say nothing of everyone who uses it to write their mundane emails and spreadsheets.
It only seems to be people heavily involved in tech as part of their day job who have any serious concerns about it.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
You handwaved that 40% to a positive. This could easily mean very few people have a positive view of AI.
Where does that leave 60, then?
> huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies
The latter point is doing a lot of heavy lifting because the first point is whitewashing history. Back in the 90's, you had exactly one cable TV provider, one phone provider, maybe one or two cell phone providers if you could afford one, and your internet options were limited to either your cable TV provider or your landline phone provider for DSL, or AOL if you were really unfortunate.
You probably had one trash / sanitation provider, one choice of place to send your kids to school (unless you went the religious school route or could afford a private school, assuming one was nearby). You had one option for getting your mail delivered. One choice for policing, for fire protection and other emergency services, etc. Having only a few options has been a pretty big part of a lot of daily life.
The internet felt more wild and free, because there weren't too many places to go, and most people didn't go there. The internet didn't shrink, but people who started going online went all went to the same places, so all the growth went... where people actually wanted to go.
Here's a practical example: your gmail account today is probably more important to you than your phone number was in the 90s and you can run afoul of some random ML subsystem and lose access. There is no recourse or accountability. Randomly loosing your phone number and not having recourse was not a thing back then.
But yes, I was on the internet in the 90s, the little playground we fled to has grown into a terrible panopticon run by unaccountable people for their own personal interest. NIMBY DC opposition is a terrible proxy to tackle this, but it may be the only tool available.
Anecdotal experience doesn't matter. Mine contradicts yours, but my anecdotal experience also isn't strong evidence.
There are countless polls showing that the American public's sentiment towards AI is both negative and falling.
Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?
If you were asked, would you vote to allow the building of your own home, the roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality?
The idea that data centers are some unique blight on the environment when we used to build actual factories in this country is just absurdly laughable to me.
"Says here[1] on this study published by university lab funded by a consortium of the same interests that develop the solar that this is fine"
-smarmy HN linkposters
[1] <link to study that doesn't even support my thesis but you can't tell because it's behind a paywall>
Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.
Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?
I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.
If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.
The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
If environmental concerns were the real issue, we'd be talking about how to tweak those regulations. If power distribution was the real issue, we'd be talking about the economics of power companies and their infrastructure upgrades.
It's strange how we're suddenly talking about things like illegal concrete dumping, as if it was somehow specific to datacenters, and not 99% of buildings built in the past century.
This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.
On the flip side a datacenter never showed up to a town meeting to screech about how my way of life ought to be illegal, how the businesses I patronize ought to be punitively regulated, how I ought to pay more taxes so that the city can do things I don't want done, etc, etc.
And I say this as someone who already lives near a bunch of industrial sites.
Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout, and have resisted all attempts at increasing the governance of the gas generation.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas' "Capacity, Demand and Reserves report" even details a scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply in 2026.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2025/02/12/CapacityDemandan...
Now add data centre demand in a climate where passive-cooling isn't viable and inter-state redundancy is non-existent.
Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.
El Paso is not part of the Texas grid (ERCOT):
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/us-grid-regions
Neither are the panhandle nor the northeastern portion.
Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.
https://www.spp.org/documents/71831/ercot-spp%20coordination...
No one wants the grid to collapse after all (except you I guess, for whatever reason).
> The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with a 220 MW DC tie near Oklaunion, and a 600 MW DC tie near Monticello, and is tied to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico with a 300 MW DC tie near McAllen, and a 100 MW VFT tie near Laredo.[29] There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas
Better for the extra natural gas to power data centers than to "accidentally" leak into the atmosphere .
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.
Red states still have a significant population that don't vote Republican and they're more often than not the ones who bear the brunt of negatives like data center construction.
I typically don't vote for Republicans, and I typically do vote for environmental protection. However, my state is heavily gerrymandered by the Republican supermajority here.
So, I don't really have a choice.
Also, go fuck yourself for being so glib about an entire state's population and wishing them ill.
This utopia that everyone has about electric cars will never come to fruition without grid upgrades.
This country has systematically underinvested and underdeveloped the electric grid for 50 years and now we are paying the price. It is a government failing.
That answer is interesting. Its cause in most states, if a company formally requests a power hookup, the power company MUST comply. Thus entails in upgrading substations, transformers, supply lines, etc. And all those upgrades are borne by the citizens in that region.
That's why you bill goes up, cause datacenter upgrades dump on the public their externalities.
In some states like Indiana, the governor is already talking about changing that law requiring data centers to pay for upgrades.
The real problem is boomers have stopped allowing things to be built efficiently, so supply is limited, had been limited for decades, and demand still grows, so prices spike disproportionally with demand increases.
Additionally we subsidize wind and solar heavily, but the fixed costs of large plants don't drop, so we end up spending for our power twice and for natural gas plants to replace coal, because that's the only solution we will do to keep power during the winter in Northern states.
You’re technically correct, but missing the point and imo arguing more or less with yourself only.
https://news.ftcpublications.com/core/coastal-cities-test-se...