Hacker News Reader

Comment by xphos | Hacker News Reader

Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.

Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much

View on HN

> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.

> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.

> an excise tax on number of servers

We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.

More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.

I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term

Yeah but the data centers write contracts that making changing the laws around property contractually impossible if you don't argree to their hostile terms they just move to the next town willing to accept. Towns are not a necessiarly smart enough to do all contractual footwork especially when companies heavily lobby the towns population with empty promises. But even if they do the best thing that happens is the company moves to a more willing town. Most data centers are build in poor places because those towns are looking for something to change their circumstances.

Also I am not saying factories are all good they pump stuff like TEFLON in rivers but at least the people locally get a good job out of it. And they make those trades even when the negative impacts exceed the positive gains like with data centers. Its from position of depressed town where the people want to see the golden days return.

Also this is a deal with negatives and positives you haven't listed a positive for these data centers in your reply I think is indicitive that you haven't explored the effect of data centers in places like Louisiana which is very permisive.

I think just saying maybe towns should do better laws doesn't recognize the power differential between a town and likely a poor town and a Trillion dollar corportations. Idea's like an excise tax like that is way more complex than you are thinking does a server excise tax effect just these data centers or anyone doing data center processing i.e local hospitals. The Law is very complex when it comes to inventing new taxes but yeah some of those things should be investigated it might be a good case to have a pause to study those proposals and implement them so that towns don't just get screwed over. And I am not saying there isn't a dynamic in which data centers can help local communities its just that has not been the case for more data centers than the public is potentially willing to tolerate. Make the economics better for people and I am sure governments would not stand in the way its just at this point their is little effort to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com