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?
> how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
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.
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.
According to Google, Texas currently has about 87GW of peak capacity & a data center production pipeline that will require 75-100GW. So the state will have to basically double its peak capacity to supply power to all those new data centers.
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.
Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
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.
Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.
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.
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.
> 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
Completely serious. Sea water cooling for data centers is already in use here in Helsinki. And water temperature in the Gulf of America doesn't seem to go above 30 C even in the summer.
Sea water would have to be piped to places like Dallas, whereas much of Finland's people/data centers are closer to the shoreline. A solution that works in certain places does not generally work everywhere.
There's no need to build them in Dallas. Just keep them near the shoreline. The only reason you have so many data centers in North Jersey is so high frequency traders can make their calls 0.02ms before their competitors on the NYSE. For an average user, the 1ms ping between Dallas and Corpus Christi is not a problem.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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,
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.
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. 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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...
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.
> People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive,
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 live in a red state; my electricity bill went up 40% (flat rate annual billing), but my consumption only went up 10%. Local newspaper reports that this is because of data centers.
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.
Grid upgrades would have to happen no matter what. Data centers are just the catalyst and boogeyman at the moment.
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.
The real question is "why do rates go up with a data center?"
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 rules shouldn't be specific to datacenters though; mechanics like Pennsylvania's "but-for" cost allocation make sense globally. If a new smelting plant requires upgrades to a substation, which wouldn't otherwise be necessary, the smelting plant should be charged accordingly.
Every place I'm familiar with has demand charges on large-scale users that is supposed to pay for that equipment.
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.
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.
NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change.
Yeah why do I have to pay to get it in my roof when a solar company will buy land to put up solar cells. Just put it on my roof instead. I won't complain.
That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you one of them? The other side of the issue is "raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities" according to the article. I guess the crux is figuring out who would suffer the most, data center expanders/builders, or the local community? If the latter, then this move seems right from my point of view, but I'm also not building/managing data centers.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Not exactly. Much of the anti-datacenter population got that way from hearing about the irresponsible ones and don't want it happening in their area. If they never heard about it because it was in the middle of nowhere, then they wouldn't be involved. It's NIMBY - data center or houses, don't build it near me.
A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing, I don’t think it’s fair to say they are both coming from the same NIMBY sentiment. Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no
"Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no"
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.
>A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing,
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
A lot of us would be happy with them being more heavily taxed on consumption and that money going directly to making everyone’s utility bills much cheaper. Being forced to create more capacity would also be great.
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.
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 causing the industry to start lobbying pol/pol's friends.
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.
Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.
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.
99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.
Obviously you're welcome to whatever beliefs comfort you, but most data centers that are anywhere near anyone are not related to AI, largely because AI applications are not very sensitive to latency and don't need to be near users. The specific one in Hayward I mentioned is advertised for corporate IT, as is another one in Pittsburg (California).
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
But we are talking about new data centers that are usually being built for the exact purpose of housing AI facilities? I'm not sure why you are being so obtuse about this point. Stating what already exists in data centers in general misses the point, either in ignorance or you are just being disingenuous. Given that you don't seem ignorant, it leaves the rest of us with the belief it'd only be the latter.
No way. DCs and DC expansion existed before AI but they were inconsequential. What's new is the massive ones being built by the lowest bidder solely for AI. For a working template look at the xAI one that gave an entire town asthma, but luckily most of them overrun cost and get abandoned.
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.
The Army should just shell that place, but Elon's crimes are not mainstream data center projects. I don't think we should allow someone to just set up a gas pipeline and open the valve, but I also apply this logic proportionally to major polluters like cars and airplanes and non-IT grid loads that rely on fossil fuel generators.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. I know it is true because NYTimes wrote on the matter.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
Chips can also be water cooled, and Texas borders an endless supply of water in the Gulf of America.
https://news.ftcpublications.com/core/coastal-cities-test-se...
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/regsatprod/gom/sst_map.php
Better for the extra natural gas to power data centers than to "accidentally" leak into the atmosphere .
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.
You’re technically correct, but missing the point and imo arguing more or less with yourself only.
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.
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>
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.