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Comment by runtime_terror | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Found something. Not very exact data, but Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers per capita, but average electric bills: https://www.electricchoice.com/average-electric-bills/

I agree with your take on tradeoffs when it comes to DCs that are built with tax abatements, which are a terrible deal for consumers. Those that are not receiving tax benefits will make up for short-term energy prices with long-term property tax benefits, that will eventually pay back the grid upgrades and fund even more upgrades in the future.

> It's pretty well documented that datacenters (esp the AI variety) are offloading grid expenses to customers as higher baseline costs.

I'm sure you can present this documentation, then.

Here you go:

Harvard University Law Press: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-pub...

Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/13/ai-data-centers-electricity-...

There are many more if you care to look

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