The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts(theatlantic.com) |
The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts(theatlantic.com) |
I would put the noise in the "fact" column.
Your customers used to be excited for technology. Getting a Facebook account was fun and exciting. Getting a smartphone was about solving cool problems and messing around with beer drinking apps. We all know how that turned out.
Now we are being sold AI as something that’s going to steal our jobs and the companies developing AI are marketing them by saying they’re going to literally destroy humanity. This is after the leaders of these companies already decided to make our existing SaaS landscape an enshittified surveillance economy.
Fuck off. I’m not going to allow an AI data center in my back yard. What do I get out of it? It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue for my town because barely anyone works there and no commerce takes place locally.
That's the world Trump and friends want. Are you signing onto that?
> It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue
Facts still matter, Virginia (the data center capital of the country) is raising revenues specifically from data centers
https://mgrid.org/2026/06/30/virginia-enacts-first-us-data-c...
We can and should tax data centers and more. Historically states have competed for industrial projects by giving tax breaks, but that does not have to be how it is.
It is the tech industry’s own system that has spread the misinformation about data centers. They’re just dogfooding their own ideal society and oopsed their way into feeling a negative result for themselves. They can turn off the algorithm right now and stop pushing engagement bait and put all our feeds back into chronological mode. If they did that a long time ago, I bet the outrage over AI data centers would be insignificant. How did that outrage spread in the first place?
This isn’t about facts, this is about politics. Politics are “who is on my side, who is going to help me, who has wronged me,” etc.
Virginia as you pointed out now has to make a special tax just to make the data centers worth having. The implication is that property, payroll, income, and sales tax aren’t enough to make them a net positive for the state.
Data centers have no almost no interaction with the local economy. They don’t rely on local suppliers, barely employ anyone, and don’t sell or buy local products and services in the area.
Paying me to accept something I would otherwise reject, that doesn't benefit me and may harm me, is called a bribe, isn't it? Or a bit more charitably, getting me on your side by offering a (usually not significant) share of the profits.
Two blog posts I'd like to refer you to:
Adam Mastroianni: "Incentives Are For Losers" https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-lo...
Matt Stoller: "The Rage Of The Billionaires Is Coming" https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-rag...
They’d have to be grid neutral. So generate your own power or pay for new generation whatever it is but your data center can’t raise electricity prices.
Power generation can’t be loud or otherwise environmentally annoying. No extra noise. Smells. Pollution. You gotta find a way to get power without harming the environment.
Property taxes for the building and such are 5x what they are for any other such building and are binding for 10 years. If you build it in year one and the bust happens and it’s dormant idk the taxes are in escrow and are due us for the next ten years.
All infra necessary or impacts of it developers have to build and pay for. If you need roads or are gonna impact them to build it then you gotta build alternatives.
And the water used must be recycled and self sustaining. If you need a million gallons fine but that’s all we can’t have data centers sucking up all the water.
Do that and you get my blessing.
I realize these requirements are tall orders but there’s basically infinite money and they’re still far cheaper than space data centers.
They can have a closed loop cooling system, but it costs more energy to run and would eat into their profits. so they use evaporative cooling, cheaper, but consumes entire towns worth of water. If this is pumped from the ground, round water levels dry up in all around and peoples wells dry up.
Given that folks like you think there's infinite money and they can make outrageous demands for taxes, I think it's not obvious that terrestrial centers are "far cheaper".
Vacuum is an insulator. I think you may have been mislead.