NYT could do with a more productive headline because “mocking” is not the salient point. Take from the closing paragraphs of the article:
”if communities in the United States do not want data centers to power artificial intelligence, then China will benefit.
“If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,” the president wrote. “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
That seems like a very reasonable assertion and one that’s hard to contend with.
Or the headline could focus on the political gamble that the article also talks about.
Journalism from many outlets has confirmed that the people claiming to be directly impacted by excessive noise pollution (90 dB or more), air pollution from on-site generation or water pollution are authentic and not fraudulent, but also that these cases are the results of a minority of data centre operators or builders cutting corners and being generally shoddy.
If the national security argument is that important, why not force the operators to accept the use of the Army Corps of Engineers to bring these sites either up to code or adequately mitigated?
Several of the claims of on-site water pollution that I've looked into were clearly bullshit, basically unrelated to a building being a data center at all; and I have no reason to think that the claims of people being impacted by excessive noise pollution aren't also bullshit - indeed, the most plausible way this could be happening is that some data center operators are using fossil fuel generators to generate electric power in the absence of local grid capacity too close to residential areas, which is also not particularly related to buildings being data centers as such and is more of an indictment of the American power grid. But you can also power a data center with solar panels in the right location and I don't trust that this isn't also a thing people are exaggerating or lying about because random ordinary people have a folk environmentalist hatred of built structures and the media reporting on them is afraid of AI.
That hasn't been true since SZ was a fishing village where the government was planning infrastructure to enable early stage development into a manufacturing site near HK.
Now it looks a lot like Silicon Valley except the buildings are bigger. The huge manufacturing complexes are still there, but relatively less prominent.
What revenues are provided to the locals (people, or government) from data centre operators aside from taxes on water/power? Once constructed, they provide few jobs, and their services are used wherever the network touches. It's not like the presence of a data centre spawns a lot of tech related construction (offices, cloud servers, Starbucks, ...).
There are few people whose financial/investment advice I'd trust less than Trump's. All such statements from him are intended to enrich him, not you. If you have to take a hit to make him richer, he's fine with that.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 14.9 ms ] thread”if communities in the United States do not want data centers to power artificial intelligence, then China will benefit. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,” the president wrote. “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
That seems like a very reasonable assertion and one that’s hard to contend with.
Or the headline could focus on the political gamble that the article also talks about.
If the national security argument is that important, why not force the operators to accept the use of the Army Corps of Engineers to bring these sites either up to code or adequately mitigated?
Now it looks a lot like Silicon Valley except the buildings are bigger. The huge manufacturing complexes are still there, but relatively less prominent.