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Comment by touwer | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the politicians wanting all these data centers. It's not a lot of jobs. And when these datacenters are built for a US-company, big fat chance that a European alternative has less chance of a good spot. It's utterly stupid. And then there is the electricity usage, the uglyness, environmental issues.

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I think the property taxes go up as the land captured is usually fallow so it goes from negligible property tax revenue to small. And although there aren't a ton of jobs like a factory, it's still jobs that wouldn't exist as data centers use land that literally no one else wants to do anything with.

AWS employs 239,020 globally.

It is in fact a lot of jobs.

Only a tiny minority of AWS employees work on/in/around the data centers. Quick research shows an average of ~0.2-0.3 employees per MW for large DCs, so at best it's gonna be a couple hundred jobs.

Power transfer stations also don't have a lot of jobs on site. But they provide infrastructure for millions of jobs.

Are you aware that data centers function globally? You don't need to have a data center next to you.

The datacenters pay local taxes, and it's an absolutely insane number per unit area of DC.

I mean you could say something similar about most utilities though. Google will pay taxes on their investment to Finland and the services will be available to people in the region whats else would you really ask for?

Oligarchy, it's comprised of both the politicians and those at the top of corporations and "non profits"

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