I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
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.
Ny also for as long as I've been here, does not try to have first mover advantage. The state really does usually show up second or third to the party. So to speak.
Too often people forget to mention all the first mover disadvantages. It’s often perfectly fine to wait for things to evolve and join when they are better understood and stabilized. Let the others spend money, political capital, and figure out what works, then eventually join the party, without all the baggage the first movers have accumulated
This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.
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.
> AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
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.
why are we talking about bernie sanders in the context of new york state? he's a US senator from vermont. this is state-level politics, not federal, in the state of new york, not vermont. and he's not mentioned once in this article?
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
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.
Exactly. Towns are also increasingly nervous that when the bottom drops out of the AI bubble they’ll be left with abandoned half-built data centers blighting their communities. It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible.
Let's be honest. There is a way to safely build data centers. Sensible laws could be made for them to build enough solar so they can power themselves or they are responsible for the cost of increasing capacity. Things like environmental impact and pollution need to be taken into account. However, since this is America, that won't happen. So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.
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.
"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing"
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.
Yeah - there seem to be a lot of pretenses which don't actually justify banning a particular industry.
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.
> 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
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible to address it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being externally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
My point is essentially that there are no new problems here, just the usual problems that we already have regulatory frameworks to address. Sometimes those existing frameworks are imperfect, e.g. in some states, power companies can't charge large customers for many of the infrastructure upgrades needed to serve them.
There's no novel problem here that any particular industry would need to find novel solutions for. Just some states ought to tweak their rules about the costs of distribution infrastructure upgrades.
If "this" was a single new Ford plant, I would imagine that the local population around it would be having a similar conversation.
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:
"Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article"
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
Sure, that's a fair point. You're right that I don't have those numbers, and I would be willing to be that at the moment, no one does.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
> Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point
It won’t change at all, of course. I think maybe you don’t understand the reason for the moratorium. A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. Right now data centers are being built with no consideration for the effect on the surrounding area and, big surprise, people don’t like that.
> Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too.
Eh. The right wing is far more responsive to business wants than it is to populist demands. Right wing politicians do not like banning data centers even if right wing voters do.
"A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. "
Yea, and my bet is none of this is going to happen. There is simply no incentive to make it happen. Why would a government take all these steps? What's the incentive? Much easier to just keep things the way they are.
"The right wing is far more responsive to business wants"
This is all pre-Trump thinking. Trump just randomly banned Fable, tonnes of MAGA politicos running on the "ban datacenter" ticket, all this is simply no longer true.
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,
> We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds
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.
To some extent you wonder if this "tapping the brakes" might be saving some companies from themselves. It's likely we're in the overinvestment phase of this technological cycle and that's usually followed by the bust phase where a lot of companies with a lot of debt go under. See The Panic of 1873 and the overbuilding of railroads (and huge debt accumulation) that led to that.
I also feel like there has been very little discussion of a localized benefit of data centers compared to the negative impacts. As someone who uses AI and other services that need data centers, I certainly understand why they need to exist. I have not heard a compelling argument for why they need to exist anywhere near me. I'm generally anti-NIMBY, but usually with the understanding that there is actually benefit to certain things existing in my proverbial backyard. If that argument exists for data centers I've yet to hear it.
Yup. This is my main issue with these datacenters. They have a few major local negatives (higher electrical prices, potentially high pollution, noise) and almost no real benefit due to their location.
I experience no difference when I run my LLM either here in the US or in the EU or even in China.
So why should these be given any special treatment and tax benefits? They don't really create jobs locally (beyond the initial construction) and they won't bring in any sort of tax revenue beyond what you could get from property taxes. That makes them just a general nuisance. They are much like sewage or landfills, they serve a purpose and are needed but boy would I never want one near me (unless the company actually ends up paying for my community).
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
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.
It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.
Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.
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?
I love AI assisted learning and code generation - absolutely despise AI “art” though - image, music, written word, video. If AI was just being used to get shit done efficiently, what a dream that would be, instead we are generating infinite mountains of useless bytes to suck people’s brains out in TikTok feeds and annihilate access to original thoughts in a Google search.
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
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.
The Catskills have those environmental protection laws because they are the water source for NYC. It would be very stupid to relax those to build data centers.
The AI ones are a hundred times larger. Formerly you needed a building to house racks where each customer had a few servers, now they want a megacomplex all dedicated to one purpose. Few of these are even getting completed, most are abandoned for cost reasons.
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
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.
This is caused by capital accumulation. An oft repeated comment is "these guys being billionaires doesn't make you poor". But it does - it gives them large-scale unilateral control of society's resources to the detriment of regular people. This is an example.
> web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller
> 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.
Well, the 90s were a time of liberalization/deregulation so definitely a moving target, but the monopolies/layer of mediation were held back by variety cultural, regulatory and legislative checks. Glass-Steagall was repealed in '99, fairness doctorine was repealed in '87, but the mindset and expectations remained in place, the idea of Citizens United would have been considered absurd, agencies had stronger regulations, etc etc. Today you have a handful of people who control these companies (non voting shares) paying money directly to the president in return for preferential access. Laws and the public interest are not a part of any consideration.
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.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
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.
Probably but now planning of these datacenters will now include power redundancy and a shit ton of backup power. Some commenters here think "just move dc to texas." Sounds like a good idea until you realize grid is nearly entirely separate from federal grid. State manages it and completely ignores any attempts to weatherize it.
2021 was an absolute disaster. There was a moment where the grid could have completely collapsed. But by some luck, the state avoided that.
These feels like bribe seeking behavior. Pol sees an industry that likely will have a lot of potential market within the pol's jurisdiction, pol publicly puts a speedbump or roadblock in front of the industry cause the industry to start lobbying pol/pol's friends.
A good solution for this is just the AI companies to cut access to this types of areas. After all AI is just bubble that will pop any second. It obviously have no economic values as the tokenmaxxing fiasco showed.
A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.
Oregon has a 1-year moratorium on new data centers qualifying for the state's Enterprise Zone (EZ) property tax incentive programs (as of June 5, 2026. We shouldn't be giving tax incentives to these Data Centers. But it looks like this NY moratorium goes way beyond that to actually stopping construction.
I have a family member that wants to ban all data centers and I felt like Daniel Plainview in the milkshake scene showing them the AWS region selector interface, explaining that regional data center bans in deep leftist areas won't move the needle.
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.
"totalitarian" for a democratically elected representative government to ban something? How? If other counties or states want them fine, godspeed, take them. We'll be just fine without them.
- Lifetime resident of what might as well be called AWS us-east-1, Virginia now.
The regional AI policies can be fully democratic, but banning AI data center construction globally would require coordination that only a totalitarian undemocratic one world government could achieve.
Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.
Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.
Where did anyone say a global ban or even national? I personally do not see it as "an incredible economic opportunity," I see it as a massive gamble that won't bear fruit, but that's beside the point. If localities want to bet on them fine, they can have them like I originally said.
Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, this is pretty clumsy regulation that will just cause Tiebout sorting away from NY. If there are negative externalities, tax 'em, use the proceeds for some feel-good social programming, and let the data center builders internalize the costs...
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
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.
People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.
Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.
AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.
> 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.
The Mayor is literally implementing stuff to build more affordable housing. I agree that ultimately a lot less regulation is needed to make it easier to simply build, but your take on it belongs in a New York Post editorial. It's not serious.
> 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.
Your dichotomy is bullshit. People in blue collar trades are no more "normal" than most of the people working white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, etc.
The mayor of NYC froze rent... rent controls are the opposite of building more affordable housing, since it disincentivizes building and renting units.
That's not the only thing he has done. There are also initiatives to actually build it, which I agree is the correct response over rent control (which is more of a bandaid, and a bad one at that).
I don't think rent controls disincentivize building more because not all buildings can be subject thereto.
Affordable housing is literally treating housing a scarce resource for the state to divide up. It’s good for people who are already in the system or able to get into it but bad for everyone else. We just need radically more market rate supply rather than trying more affordable housing which has been a total failure. It is time to try supply side reforms.
> Your dichotomy is bullshit.
Middle class is the 25th-55th percentile of income. Most workers in tech/ finance/ law are above the 55th and most people in the trades are below it. Teachers and the like aren’t going to directly benefit from construction, but would atleast benefit from property taxes.
> People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.
Fleeting economic opportunities that don't survive the construction phase - a few months most. No one will move from New York to Texas for a chance to be one of the 17 long-term staff at a data center: no one wants to be a data center night man that badly.
I consider myself pretty YIMBY, but the data center build outs are definitely starting to catch my eye.
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.
As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular.
It definitely also applies to infrastructure like building out clean energy or highways. My connection there was to say, yes build a data center so that we also need to build more energy production. I feel like a lot of people view the current problem from the lens that energy is a finite resource, when its also something that can be expanded.
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?
If the factory in Tennessee is its own legal entity and the sales office is in another (it’s a group) then yes transfer pricing is used where the goal is to use the market price of an arm length distance (what would you pay for the factory/data center if it was someone unrelated to you) and if same company (guess more uncommon) you use formulas to allocate where value is created and where taxes should be paid.
Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity.
You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.
The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.
The factory comparison is a moot point. This isn't about taxation.
Do you seriously think the people hysterically screaming about any data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory??
We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use far less than the automotive factories you've referenced). These are all solved problems.
What's new is the doomer religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years and is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria. The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning under secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately.
First off business are taxed on profits not revenues, so a money losing business doesn't pay taxes.
Second if there is something that causes undesirable side effects (like a data center) you want to tax that activity specifically so the Corp with 8 data centers pays more then the Corp with 1.
Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.
The anti-climate change movement has been around well before social media so it is pretty much just ingrained at this point. Anti-datacenter is feeling the influence of social media. So while people are not as motivated by anti-climate change as they are numb to it, the datacenter movement can still gets all of the feels.
With datacenters there is a huge amount of ragebait in the news and social media. People are anxious about jobs and reporters and influencers are cashing in on that anxiety by running headlines that imply doom. Datacenters are hugely problematic. But, everywhere I go I see media and commenters exaggerating, implying, assuming, or just making up outrageous claims. But, it's the hot topic right now and outrage drives the clicks that pays the bills. So, ragebait it is.
We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.
> What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy?
_O&G industry has entered the chat_
O&G industry is the answer to your question. They have the motive to ensure that their energy production method is dominant and have the funds to send lobbyists to convince/pay off lawmakers/politicians to advance their mission.
I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.
There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent.
Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.
There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.
Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.
And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.
Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.
These things consume a pretty huge amount of power, more than a steel mill. If they are haphazardly put on a grid without the generation support then the power company has 2 options, brown out or selective blackouts (or risk tripping the whole grid).
It's not silly that an already stressed grid (I'll remind you that NYC just recently asked its citizens to turn the AC to 78 to avoid a brown out) might be pushed over the edge with a new datacenter.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 57.3 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
BAD:
GOOD: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.
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.
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 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.
Who's "we" in this statement? It can't be be the general public because historically, legally, and morally, the persons causing the problem are responsible to address it. When CFC refrigerants were damaging the ozone, "we" didn't talk about alternative chemistry for heat transfer, we adopted the Montreal Protocol and the industry had to figure out the solutions while being externally constrained from externalizing harm to the general public.
There's no novel problem here that any particular industry would need to find novel solutions for. Just some states ought to tweak their rules about the costs of distribution infrastructure upgrades.
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...
This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".
What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.
I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.
P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.
> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things
And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.
Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.
It won’t change at all, of course. I think maybe you don’t understand the reason for the moratorium. A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. Right now data centers are being built with no consideration for the effect on the surrounding area and, big surprise, people don’t like that.
> Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too.
Eh. The right wing is far more responsive to business wants than it is to populist demands. Right wing politicians do not like banning data centers even if right wing voters do.
Yea, and my bet is none of this is going to happen. There is simply no incentive to make it happen. Why would a government take all these steps? What's the incentive? Much easier to just keep things the way they are.
"The right wing is far more responsive to business wants"
This is all pre-Trump thinking. Trump just randomly banned Fable, tonnes of MAGA politicos running on the "ban datacenter" ticket, all this is simply no longer true.
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,
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.
Isn’t the guy famous for making losing money?
I experience no difference when I run my LLM either here in the US or in the EU or even in China.
So why should these be given any special treatment and tax benefits? They don't really create jobs locally (beyond the initial construction) and they won't bring in any sort of tax revenue beyond what you could get from property taxes. That makes them just a general nuisance. They are much like sewage or landfills, they serve a purpose and are needed but boy would I never want one near me (unless the company actually ends up paying for my community).
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.
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.
Generally, in American winner-take-all politics, 60% is considered a massive landslide.
Where does that leave 60, then?
</sarcasm>
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.
They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.
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.
> 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.
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 Data warehouse company.
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.
It’s all fun and games until the cost of beef and oil skyrockets.
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.
> 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.
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
Many economically stagnant areas actually see it as an incredible economic opportunity when Americans want to destroy their lead in AI, because they can capture business investment that would be reliably American.
Crushing AI would require crushing these countries, many of which are already hostile to American foreign policy.
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...
I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.
Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.
AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.
The Mayor is literally implementing stuff to build more affordable housing. I agree that ultimately a lot less regulation is needed to make it easier to simply build, but your take on it belongs in a New York Post editorial. It's not serious.
> 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.
Your dichotomy is bullshit. People in blue collar trades are no more "normal" than most of the people working white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, etc.
I don't think rent controls disincentivize building more because not all buildings can be subject thereto.
> Your dichotomy is bullshit.
Middle class is the 25th-55th percentile of income. Most workers in tech/ finance/ law are above the 55th and most people in the trades are below it. Teachers and the like aren’t going to directly benefit from construction, but would atleast benefit from property taxes.
Fleeting economic opportunities that don't survive the construction phase - a few months most. No one will move from New York to Texas for a chance to be one of the 17 long-term staff at a data center: no one wants to be a data center night man that badly.
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.
As far as I'm aware, the YIMBY "movement", or whatever you want to call it, is pretty squarely about housing development. It's not about saying yes to building anything and everything, but saying yes to new housing in particular.
For example, https://newyorkyimby.com/ is pretty much exclusively about housing.
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?
You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center.
The problem is mostly on the electricity side, with highly regulated utilities not prepared (on the regulator or regulated sides) to respond to such a large shock to demand. Utilities are typically regulated at the state level.
Do you seriously think the people hysterically screaming about any data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory??
We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use far less than the automotive factories you've referenced). These are all solved problems.
What's new is the doomer religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years and is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria. The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning under secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately.
Well we better figure out where it ought to come from then. Maybe AI can help us explore the latent space.
So force then to pay more for electricity or water either through direct taxes or by forcing them to subsidize other users.
Am I missing something?
Second if there is something that causes undesirable side effects (like a data center) you want to tax that activity specifically so the Corp with 8 data centers pays more then the Corp with 1.
We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.
_O&G industry has entered the chat_
O&G industry is the answer to your question. They have the motive to ensure that their energy production method is dominant and have the funds to send lobbyists to convince/pay off lawmakers/politicians to advance their mission.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.
Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.
There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.
Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.
And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.
Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.
[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/micron-delay-construct...
These things consume a pretty huge amount of power, more than a steel mill. If they are haphazardly put on a grid without the generation support then the power company has 2 options, brown out or selective blackouts (or risk tripping the whole grid).
It's not silly that an already stressed grid (I'll remind you that NYC just recently asked its citizens to turn the AC to 78 to avoid a brown out) might be pushed over the edge with a new datacenter.