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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?

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The build out will take a couple years. I don't care about the noise. No one will hear it. It's an hour away from anything. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The DC will employee probably 100 high paid people. That money goes back into my town. The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC. It's going to be the biggest tax generator this county has ever seen by a lot. We just had to raise property taxes by 37% to fund our schools. We need the money.

I seriously doubt it needs 100 highly paid people. These will be automated to death. A few guys employed out of state, periodically visiting to swap out dead GPUs and staying in the nearest hotel. Maybe a bored HVAC engineer on site for maintenance.

I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.

If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.

If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.

I don't know much about this, but isn't Stratos ultimately planned to be 9GW, or 250x the size of your 36MW DC? Even if it doesn't scale proportionally, it's not hard to see it get to 100 people.

It will not employ 100 highly paid people, sorry.

According to Oleary it will employ about 5000 permanent workers. According to the county it will employ 1-2k permanent workers. These are going to be rented out data centers to other companies who will staff their people here. There will need to be a large number of people managing the power generation. What resources do you have to say it won't employ 100 people?

These numbers are pretty inconsistent with other major data center rollouts. Furthermore, there are no repercussions (AFAIK) if the project fails to deliver that many permanent jobs. Oleary can say all he wants but unless there is some specific tax or legal measure that says "you must pay at least 2,000 FTE at a rate of $150k/year for at least 20 years" then it's basically impossible to guarantee these numbers. And frankly no data center developer would sign up for that liability knowing full well that humans at data center may well end up being automated (even more than they are today).

Experience?

The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.

The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?

You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?

You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.

You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.

> The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC

You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.

According to the county 30 million per year during the build out then 108 million at max capacity. Our budget last year was 76.3 million. This will be more money than we know what to do with.

The DC is going to pay $108m in property taxes per year? There's a source for this?

You're still wrong about the job creation benefits. But if this is really, verifiably true it sounds like a good deal.

"This will be more money than we know what to do with." That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. This is what leads to inflated city budgets, wasteful/risky projects and fraud.

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