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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong, but from load-balancing perspective, if one of these companies moved to another city then probably both cities would be better off?

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Anthropic and OpenAI don’t have that many employees compared to most big employers. Their employees are highly compensated. The ratio between the housing the occupy and the taxes paid by their employees has to be one of the most favorable ratios of all companies in the area.

Losing those companies and their employees would cost the cities far more than they might gain.

Makes sense financially, but I suspect that the reason this isn’t all that appealing politically is that ordinary people can’t get those jobs. “We have a few, very rich employees” doesn’t seem like much of a selling point. It’s another example of inequality.

Data center finances seem vaguely similar? They could be a good source of tax revenue but don’t provide many jobs.

Silicon Valley exists as a persistent thumb on the nose against load-balancing ideas. It's had an absolute glut of tech companies for many decades now, with no apologies needed. Many people in the region benefit from that concentration of talent, wealth, and capital.

It does seem that way nowadays, but I wonder why more tech companies don't bring it to a different city, like Microsoft did in Redmond. The old tech companies did things like that but the newer companies mostly aren't for some reason.

I suppose there are some moving to Texas. But the East Bay is a lot closer.

The East Bay does have some spillover! But there are various reasons it's not as attractive. My hunch is that one of the major reasons is that commutes from the Peninsula and Silicon Valley itself are rough.

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