I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.
There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess
Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter.
Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.
But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.
What mess? It's a big empty metal box with a heck of an HVAC system and a parking lot sized for industrial use. Just about any less specialized use could be pivoted to at any point during or after construction.
These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.
Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.
I lived for many years in the rust belt -- abandoned industrial properties aren't particularly attractive to have in your community. Nor are they attractive to industry unless they're already outfitted for their particular use.
Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.
Cars were not a new technology either when they went nuts on highway infrastructure which ruined the city centers. Perhaps if they had slowed down and studied the impacts before bulldozing neighborhood for highways some damage might have been prevented.
The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.
I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.
Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t
The data centers being built due to the AI bubble are predominately increasing costs for public utilities. Many localities are having to make significant investments to keep the lights on and increasing rates for everyone.
If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.
To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.
It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.
Anything that slows their expansion will at least delay some of the impact on RAM and GPU prices since they aren't buying up GPUs until the places are built. In the meantime NY doesn't have to deal with the harmful environmental and health impacts.
The data centers will ultimately end up being built elsewhere, until those places start pushing back. Without federal protections for the environment or the people all we can do is hope that state, county and city governments step up to make sure that data centers aren't harming them directly.
Whats new about this? We've had data centers for 20 years now? Research which impacts?
Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.
I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.
I agree. It seems reasonable to me in the sense that
- only one year
- only affects new agreements and not current buildouts
- gives times for politicians to do whatever it is they need to do to satisfy their constituents
I'm surprised by your interpretation. As a deliberately polarizing analogy, the first Trump administration pushed for a policy that boiled down to the same principle: pause immigration from certain places "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".
I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.
The submitted link is not even loading. Meanwhile, here are two independent LLM generated "news" article generated from the Assembly and Senate bills respectively:
Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc.
It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?
It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.
People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting.
Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.
I can assure you that people protesting the the one near where I live barely know or care about AI, but they know something is up when a giant evil fuckass building shows up seemingly overnight. Who knows what sort of horrible things are going on inside, it's not like you'll be allowed in to check. The only connection to AI is that the AI companies placed the order for it.
My town also protested when Walmart decided they wanted to install one of their mega shopping centers here. A big building means someone has too much money, and its only a matter of time until they use it against YOU.
We already know that that data centers impact the environment in many ways and can be harmful for the water, air, and the health of the people around them. It's the dose that makes the poison though and so the push for more and more data centers increase the harms.
> It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.
Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.
I don't get it, nyc wants to add government programs, they obviously need to tax something. Here come massive corps willing to invest a ton of money, just tax them at some reasonable rate and voila, you can now pay for city funded grocery stores or whatever
So by your logic if a massive company came and said they want to setup an oil refinery or coal power plant you'd say they should say yes just because they could get tax revenue?
You always have to way the pros and cons of such massive projects.
Plus, this isn't a ban it's just a one year moratorium so impact etc can be studied.
Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the street in SF’s SOMA. Perhaps I should have considered Digital Realty’s facility down on Paul Ave but they’re harder to get a small system up on.
It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time.
Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.
It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
I do have GPUs running there and I'd be running them denser if I'd already paid for the power. To be honest, there's no room on 3rd Street to put turbines next to the DC there so if they wanted to put in AI they'd have to upgrade the power delivery. I don't mind that so much. Besides, most DC operators would rather pay for power than do on-site generation. That's just an artifact of what we disincentivize. Water always finds the lowest point and so on.
> higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
It speaks volumes about the degree to which we've regulated and NIMBY'd and everything else'd utility build out that on site generation in any case other than a blackout so pencils out anywhere in the US save perhaps remote regions of Alaska
I’d love more datacenters so I can colo my pet projects and startup like I was doing in the early 2000s
The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.
I live in rural Ohio and there is like 6? Colo places within an hour’s drive.
When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.
If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.
If anything, existing colos are going to be hurt by what's going on right now, as they're getting all of the political backlash from the AI hyperscaler bullshit going on.
Realistically, I'm not going to watch a video by a fellow whose entire content reel is big yellow and red capital letters saying "capitalism sucks" imposed on a horrified face. I find that these people have poor epistemic discipline. Besides, the chap has never been inside a datacenter, and not only is that a pretty big difference from me but all the significant events of my life have happened within one kilometre of one here in SF.
Datacenters are extremely loud, you definitely don't want one in your approximate backyard. Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.
These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.
Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.
We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.
It would be ironic if irrational anti-data center actions was the one thing that prevented an irrational AI bubble. (I’m thinking of a bubble in building/funding/economics, not in abilities).
The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach.
These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance:
* Water use: Almost always a red herring or non-issue, unless the DC is being built in an area with water shortages. DC's use a lot of water, but their use is negligible compared to many other industries.
* Neighborhood appearance: They're not particularly pretty to have in your back yard, but much less ugly than, say, a factory. They're not inherently polluting.
* Power draw: This is a legitimate concern as DC's use an enormous amount of electricity. In the short run, it could make sense for deep-pocketed investors to subsidize residential or non-DC power consumption to keep everyone's electric bills from skyrocketing. Longer term, power companies will need to build much more generating infrastructure. I'd love to see a carbon tax to encourage the construction of renewable (or nuclear) power. Sadly, the current US administration seems intent on vice-maxing and ruining as much as they can for future generations.
* AI-driven job displacement: I think this is the real worry people have. The water use thing is an excuse people are looking for to oppose AI.
IMHO, that last one is the crux of the issue, and banning DCs from being built in New York will do absolutely nothing to alleviate this concern. The tech billionaire class has been harping about how they'll make money for investors by automating everyone's job, and the people have noticed.
My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal.
And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.
Populist nonsense like this is all that New York passes. Data Centers have minimal impact, provides some jobs, and New York needs to upgrade their power system and build more power plants anyways.
Minimal impact as defined by whom? I'm sure they impact those that live around them plenty as well as the price on electricity for those on the same grid.
They provide mostly temporary jobs (and majority imported to boot), after construction they're run with very little staff.
New York needs to upgrade its power grid (source?) so they should force it upon themselves by primitively overloading the grid?
A one year moratorium while impact is investigated, esp considering the current state of datacenters buildout, especially considering many in the US are either unstarted, on hold or abandoned, seems reasonable.
Lets say they build 100 Data Centers in Oswego county. Per Capita income is only $20k and one of the poorest in new york state. There is a lot of space that is not used for anything. 100 Data Centers is going to provide some amount of jobs at each one, remote hands, janitorial, security, etc. Those all pay more than the per capita income. At scale you need some amount of plumbers, facilities, electricians, etc. Not to mention the local labor that gets hired to build them. I know plenty of guys working Steel that leave to go build Data Centers in other places, and go back to upstate new york. Enough Data Centers means more power plants for even more jobs.
In poor rural areas, 50 jobs paying not that much is a big improvement.
Local labor is often not used to build them. Most of these companies have crews they bring in during build out. Plus the actual setup of the facility is highly skilled: everyone is imported. The only local jobs we're talking about would be things like security, cleaning, and maybe some site prep work. The actual technical staff will not be hired locally in the majority of cases.
The argument here tho is the amount of jobs provided does not do a good enough job counteracting the downsides (noise, ground water pollution, generator air pollution, grid load and offset costs to customers, etc). In most cases these far outweigh <50 jobs if you look at overall cost/benefits.
Local labor is almost never used for these projects. Data centers are built by huge national or multinational construction companies, not a local general contractor.
Then the local utility companies have to undertake giant projects to keep up with demand. They issue many millions in bonds. Also, all of the construction trucks tear up the local roads. The local municipality has to allocate a bunch of money to fix the roads.
Then, next year, the AI bubble pops, and most of those data centers shutter their doors and stop contributing tax revenue.
Now you have the same $20k per capita income, but many millions more in debt!
It's pretty well documented that datacenters (esp the AI variety) are offloading grid expenses to customers as higher baseline costs.
The issue is that these DCs are not paying for the cost of the necessary grid upgrades but are instead having the power cos pass these costs off to all consumers as base increases.
Glad to see this, the rate at which these developments have been getting approved clearly isn't sustainable and developers have a major incentive to getting projects locked in before regulators come in to change the laws around how data centers connect to the grid, which is almost certainly happening.
there is something interesting about someone that says "I'm flagging anything I see that is uncivil" in their profile, but says "I think we should have public hangings for anyone who suggests clearing land for AI." in their comment.
Incivility is when you say something I don't like. I intended this remark to be facetious, but that is actually the definition, according to Wiktionary:
> incivility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being uncivil; lack of courtesy; rudeness in manner.
> uncivil sense 1: Not civil; discourteous; impolite
> civil sense 2: (comparable) Behaving in a reasonable or polite manner; avoiding displays of hostility.
> reasonable sense 3: Not excessive or immoderate; within due limits; proper.
> polite sense 1: Well-mannered, civilized.
> well-mannered: Having good manners; polite, courteous and socially correct; conforming to standards of good behaviour.
> hostility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being hostile.
> hostile sense 3: Unwilling.
> discourteous: Impolite; lacking consideration for others.
That's presumably why the feminists developed the concept of "tone policing".
> The obvious answer to everyone's concerns is to build them in unused buildings in cities that already have infrastructure to support them.
This is the problem.
These are mostly old office buildings.
They are not designed to supply that much electricity and water on each floor. These racks and equipment also weigh a lot and the building floors and building itself probably isn't rated for that.
Not only that, but to get the buildings themselves more electricity and water often requires a very expensive process of digging up possibly multiple streets, with associated costs and permitting.
In addition to the water delivery issue, there's power delivery. It may not even be possible to get that building enough power in the next decade or more, because there simply may not be enough power generation capability.
Basically, a lot of the same problems that exist when trying to turn an old office building into high rise apartments, but magnified many times over.
Around here they are cutting down forests. Sometimes even protected forests without getting permits, trying to beg for forgiveness after the fact.
They don't need to maximize every inch of the building, if that means less capacity then so be it.
As far as water and power, that's why I mentioned in cities that already have capacity. Or at least the ability to run new lines without digging up the roads, because they have tunnels for such things.
not really. datacenters require greater weight, power and cooling density per square foot than the typical commercial office space was built to accomodate..
B. THE TERM "DATA CENTER" SHALL NOT INCLUDE FACILITIES MAJORITY-OWNED,
OPERATED, OR OTHERWISE CONTROLLED BY A PUBLIC RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND
USED FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES.
You can't be serious? I hope I'm just missing the joke
To have an equivalent capacity of DCs in space would require such astronomical costs there is 0 chance it would be profitable esp considering how fast GPUs deprecate
How about we start with actually finishing all the datacenters we've started (many if not most are unstarted, paused or outright cancelled)?
I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.
Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.
Those things are cash cows for local municipalities. I don't think that aspect is communicated at all, or at least the media leaves that part out.
A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.
New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.
> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.
Are you sure New York doesn't have many empty lots? I can go drive through Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo and find plenty. There's a ton of land that is not being farmed that are is fully of rocky, poor quality soil.
The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.
One data center in upstate NY tried to include a call center as part of it in their quote of "500 jobs" for a planned Bitcoin farm, but then mentioned that the call center would be doing 'healthcare advocacy' calls.
My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.
Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.
"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end.
Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.
So other people's back yards it is! What a wonderful philosophy.
As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the state.
If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?
Hell, after the 'competition' was announced, many commentators observed that it was pretty much written with Arlington, VA in mind, and the competition was less a serious competition and more a ploy to try to get a lot of subsidies for what their plans already were. It's also worth noting that the bids that were accepted (Arlington and New York) were some of the most miserly bids.
"Backyard" is obviously not to be taken literally. Anywhere you put one of these things is going to have an impact on the region. But perhaps you can provide some examples of places that are not in anyone's backyard?
I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.
Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?
There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess
How much land do data center use and of which type of land?
Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter.
Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.
But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.
What mess? It's a big empty metal box with a heck of an HVAC system and a parking lot sized for industrial use. Just about any less specialized use could be pivoted to at any point during or after construction.
These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.
Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.
I lived for many years in the rust belt -- abandoned industrial properties aren't particularly attractive to have in your community. Nor are they attractive to industry unless they're already outfitted for their particular use.
Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.
Or if nobody wants to buy them
[dead]
Cars were not a new technology either when they went nuts on highway infrastructure which ruined the city centers. Perhaps if they had slowed down and studied the impacts before bulldozing neighborhood for highways some damage might have been prevented.
The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.
How are they harming consumers?
I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.
Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t
> consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes.
What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?
> How are they harming consumers?
Consumers like breathing (https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution) and drinking clean water (https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/data-center-accused-m...). The noise is loud enough to cause hearing damage, and the smell and light pollution isn't helping consumers either.
The data centers being built due to the AI bubble are predominately increasing costs for public utilities. Many localities are having to make significant investments to keep the lights on and increasing rates for everyone.
If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.
The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.
True, for the average HN consumer
But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about
To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.
The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...
It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.
That's a fair complaint, but banning data centers in NY isn't going to make RAM or GPU prices cheaper.
Anything that slows their expansion will at least delay some of the impact on RAM and GPU prices since they aren't buying up GPUs until the places are built. In the meantime NY doesn't have to deal with the harmful environmental and health impacts.
The data centers will ultimately end up being built elsewhere, until those places start pushing back. Without federal protections for the environment or the people all we can do is hope that state, county and city governments step up to make sure that data centers aren't harming them directly.
These are not new or unpredictable impacts.
The scale is new, and impacts are predictable, thus the moratorium.
Whats new about this? We've had data centers for 20 years now? Research which impacts?
Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.
I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.
I agree. It seems reasonable to me in the sense that - only one year - only affects new agreements and not current buildouts - gives times for politicians to do whatever it is they need to do to satisfy their constituents
I'm surprised by your interpretation. As a deliberately polarizing analogy, the first Trump administration pushed for a policy that boiled down to the same principle: pause immigration from certain places "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".
I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.
> it's just an attempt to shut unpopular projects down to appease the electorate.
It's weird to see "the government is doing its job by responding to its voters" being framed as some nefarious and underhanded move.
I submitted this link, which is clearly written by an LLM but has a good overview. Here's the actual bill: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S10642
The submitted link is not even loading. Meanwhile, here are two independent LLM generated "news" article generated from the Assembly and Senate bills respectively:
https://gist.github.com/impredicative/483b46ff294be6b69b0a34...
HN hug of death :)
@dang can we change the URL to the bill link please?
Contrary to popular belief, dang doesn't get notified when you write "@dang". Consider emailing hn@ycombinator.com instead.
Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc.
It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?
Data centers growth is consuming resources far beyond other industrial users.
Aluminum smelters use a lot of DC power, but smelters aren't popping up like VC fertilized mushrooms.
It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.
People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting.
Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.
I can assure you that people protesting the the one near where I live barely know or care about AI, but they know something is up when a giant evil fuckass building shows up seemingly overnight. Who knows what sort of horrible things are going on inside, it's not like you'll be allowed in to check. The only connection to AI is that the AI companies placed the order for it.
My town also protested when Walmart decided they wanted to install one of their mega shopping centers here. A big building means someone has too much money, and its only a matter of time until they use it against YOU.
> People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis.
Turns out you you don't have to reach very far at all
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
https://news.asu.edu/20260518-environment-and-sustainability...
We already know that that data centers impact the environment in many ways and can be harmful for the water, air, and the health of the people around them. It's the dose that makes the poison though and so the push for more and more data centers increase the harms.
> It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.
Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.
> because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis.
I think most people are aware that computers don't emit pollution directly. It's the externalities that do.
[dead]
And that is why China wins in production.
How is a data center defined? Is a small business dedicating a room to server racks a "data center"?
The law defines it as (approximately) anything connected to a public utility that has more than one megawatt of computing power.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S10642
We aren't even trying any more. China and the east are the future.
I don't get it, nyc wants to add government programs, they obviously need to tax something. Here come massive corps willing to invest a ton of money, just tax them at some reasonable rate and voila, you can now pay for city funded grocery stores or whatever
They already have a balanced budget, why would they need to cave to these corporations?
So by your logic if a massive company came and said they want to setup an oil refinery or coal power plant you'd say they should say yes just because they could get tax revenue?
You always have to way the pros and cons of such massive projects.
Plus, this isn't a ban it's just a one year moratorium so impact etc can be studied.
A datacenter ranks close to zero on the pollution scale. By comparison a golf course looks like a Superfund site.
Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the street in SF’s SOMA. Perhaps I should have considered Digital Realty’s facility down on Paul Ave but they’re harder to get a small system up on.
It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time.
Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.
It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
I do have GPUs running there and I'd be running them denser if I'd already paid for the power. To be honest, there's no room on 3rd Street to put turbines next to the DC there so if they wanted to put in AI they'd have to upgrade the power delivery. I don't mind that so much. Besides, most DC operators would rather pay for power than do on-site generation. That's just an artifact of what we disincentivize. Water always finds the lowest point and so on.
> higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.
It speaks volumes about the degree to which we've regulated and NIMBY'd and everything else'd utility build out that on site generation in any case other than a blackout so pencils out anywhere in the US save perhaps remote regions of Alaska
I’d love more datacenters so I can colo my pet projects and startup like I was doing in the early 2000s
The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.
I live in rural Ohio and there is like 6? Colo places within an hour’s drive.
When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.
If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.
If anything, existing colos are going to be hurt by what's going on right now, as they're getting all of the political backlash from the AI hyperscaler bullshit going on.
I would do a little due diligence here if I were you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Realistically, I'm not going to watch a video by a fellow whose entire content reel is big yellow and red capital letters saying "capitalism sucks" imposed on a horrified face. I find that these people have poor epistemic discipline. Besides, the chap has never been inside a datacenter, and not only is that a pretty big difference from me but all the significant events of my life have happened within one kilometre of one here in SF.
Datacenters are extremely loud, you definitely don't want one in your approximate backyard. Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
Some datacenters are loud. Some are quiet.
Actually cannot confirm. I'm once or twice outside of the Zurich datacenters and I really did not ever realize the sound outside.
> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.
These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.
Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.
We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.
It would be ironic if irrational anti-data center actions was the one thing that prevented an irrational AI bubble. (I’m thinking of a bubble in building/funding/economics, not in abilities).
yeah, irrational...
The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach.
These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance:
IMHO, that last one is the crux of the issue, and banning DCs from being built in New York will do absolutely nothing to alleviate this concern. The tech billionaire class has been harping about how they'll make money for investors by automating everyone's job, and the people have noticed.My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal.
And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.
Populist nonsense like this is all that New York passes. Data Centers have minimal impact, provides some jobs, and New York needs to upgrade their power system and build more power plants anyways.
Minimal impact as defined by whom? I'm sure they impact those that live around them plenty as well as the price on electricity for those on the same grid.
They provide mostly temporary jobs (and majority imported to boot), after construction they're run with very little staff.
New York needs to upgrade its power grid (source?) so they should force it upon themselves by primitively overloading the grid?
A one year moratorium while impact is investigated, esp considering the current state of datacenters buildout, especially considering many in the US are either unstarted, on hold or abandoned, seems reasonable.
Lets say they build 100 Data Centers in Oswego county. Per Capita income is only $20k and one of the poorest in new york state. There is a lot of space that is not used for anything. 100 Data Centers is going to provide some amount of jobs at each one, remote hands, janitorial, security, etc. Those all pay more than the per capita income. At scale you need some amount of plumbers, facilities, electricians, etc. Not to mention the local labor that gets hired to build them. I know plenty of guys working Steel that leave to go build Data Centers in other places, and go back to upstate new york. Enough Data Centers means more power plants for even more jobs.
In poor rural areas, 50 jobs paying not that much is a big improvement.
Local labor is often not used to build them. Most of these companies have crews they bring in during build out. Plus the actual setup of the facility is highly skilled: everyone is imported. The only local jobs we're talking about would be things like security, cleaning, and maybe some site prep work. The actual technical staff will not be hired locally in the majority of cases.
The argument here tho is the amount of jobs provided does not do a good enough job counteracting the downsides (noise, ground water pollution, generator air pollution, grid load and offset costs to customers, etc). In most cases these far outweigh <50 jobs if you look at overall cost/benefits.
Local labor is almost never used for these projects. Data centers are built by huge national or multinational construction companies, not a local general contractor.
Then the local utility companies have to undertake giant projects to keep up with demand. They issue many millions in bonds. Also, all of the construction trucks tear up the local roads. The local municipality has to allocate a bunch of money to fix the roads.
Then, next year, the AI bubble pops, and most of those data centers shutter their doors and stop contributing tax revenue.
Now you have the same $20k per capita income, but many millions more in debt!
What would you estimate is the annual electricity spend for those living next to data centers and those who don’t?
Not sure how to answer this.
It's pretty well documented that datacenters (esp the AI variety) are offloading grid expenses to customers as higher baseline costs.
The issue is that these DCs are not paying for the cost of the necessary grid upgrades but are instead having the power cos pass these costs off to all consumers as base increases.
Data centers are great, abandoned properties left in the wake of investment bubbles have a bad impact
> Data Centers have minimal impact
50k residents of Lake Tahoe need to find a new source of electricity now that their power provider is planning to feed a nearby data center[0].
0: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-...
Lake Tahoe should have gotten connected to the California grid sometime in the last 50 years.
Glad to see this, the rate at which these developments have been getting approved clearly isn't sustainable and developers have a major incentive to getting projects locked in before regulators come in to change the laws around how data centers connect to the grid, which is almost certainly happening.
[flagged]
there is something interesting about someone that says "I'm flagging anything I see that is uncivil" in their profile, but says "I think we should have public hangings for anyone who suggests clearing land for AI." in their comment.
I think I presented my thought in a civil manner.
Incivility is when you say something I don't like. I intended this remark to be facetious, but that is actually the definition, according to Wiktionary:
> incivility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being uncivil; lack of courtesy; rudeness in manner.
> uncivil sense 1: Not civil; discourteous; impolite
> civil sense 2: (comparable) Behaving in a reasonable or polite manner; avoiding displays of hostility.
> reasonable sense 3: Not excessive or immoderate; within due limits; proper.
> polite sense 1: Well-mannered, civilized.
> well-mannered: Having good manners; polite, courteous and socially correct; conforming to standards of good behaviour.
> hostility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being hostile.
> hostile sense 3: Unwilling.
> discourteous: Impolite; lacking consideration for others.
That's presumably why the feminists developed the concept of "tone policing".
I think the issue is there’s very few empty existing buildings big enough to house a modern AI data center.
> The obvious answer to everyone's concerns is to build them in unused buildings in cities that already have infrastructure to support them.
This is the problem.
These are mostly old office buildings.
They are not designed to supply that much electricity and water on each floor. These racks and equipment also weigh a lot and the building floors and building itself probably isn't rated for that.
Not only that, but to get the buildings themselves more electricity and water often requires a very expensive process of digging up possibly multiple streets, with associated costs and permitting.
In addition to the water delivery issue, there's power delivery. It may not even be possible to get that building enough power in the next decade or more, because there simply may not be enough power generation capability.
Basically, a lot of the same problems that exist when trying to turn an old office building into high rise apartments, but magnified many times over.
Around here they are cutting down forests. Sometimes even protected forests without getting permits, trying to beg for forgiveness after the fact.
They don't need to maximize every inch of the building, if that means less capacity then so be it.
As far as water and power, that's why I mentioned in cities that already have capacity. Or at least the ability to run new lines without digging up the roads, because they have tunnels for such things.
not really. datacenters require greater weight, power and cooling density per square foot than the typical commercial office space was built to accomodate..
Then they can put less stuff in each one. Destroying nature to maximize corporate value is not ok.
Elons datacenters in space are looking smarter and smarter by the day.
Mars doesn't have zoning laws yet. /jk
NIMBY = Not In Mars Back Yard
You can't be serious? I hope I'm just missing the joke
To have an equivalent capacity of DCs in space would require such astronomical costs there is 0 chance it would be profitable esp considering how fast GPUs deprecate
How about we start with actually finishing all the datacenters we've started (many if not most are unstarted, paused or outright cancelled)?
> Elons datacenters in space are looking smarter and smarter by the day.
Where would the heat go?
Alaska maybe? Water, cold temperatures, low latency to contiguous USA. Shove them underground so nobody has to look at them.
Excavating that much volume would be a heck of an expense.
I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.
Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.
Those things are cash cows for local municipalities. I don't think that aspect is communicated at all, or at least the media leaves that part out.
A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.
What? These things are built specifically where the towns give them tax breaks
How many temporary and permanent jobs does an empty lot provide? Many temporary and a few permanent sounds much better.
New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.
It looks like farming is declining in New York?
> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.
https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...
National trend:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58268
Are you sure New York doesn't have many empty lots? I can go drive through Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo and find plenty. There's a ton of land that is not being farmed that are is fully of rocky, poor quality soil.
The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.
One data center in upstate NY tried to include a call center as part of it in their quote of "500 jobs" for a planned Bitcoin farm, but then mentioned that the call center would be doing 'healthcare advocacy' calls.
My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.
Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.
"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end.
Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.
[dead]
Amazon wanted a deal that was just bad for NY.
So other people's back yards it is! What a wonderful philosophy.
As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the state.
If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?
Hell, after the 'competition' was announced, many commentators observed that it was pretty much written with Arlington, VA in mind, and the competition was less a serious competition and more a ploy to try to get a lot of subsidies for what their plans already were. It's also worth noting that the bids that were accepted (Arlington and New York) were some of the most miserly bids.
Well there are plenty of places that aren’t in anyone’s backyard
"Backyard" is obviously not to be taken literally. Anywhere you put one of these things is going to have an impact on the region. But perhaps you can provide some examples of places that are not in anyone's backyard?
The biggest possible tax break is zero tax, which is what you get when they move out of state
Again, it would have been a net loss for the city. So walking away with zero is a huge win.