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Long time listener, first time caller.
The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc
From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...
...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.
The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book
They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired
Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?
I can only speak for the data centers I've been involved with, but it has amazed me how little effort has been put into trying to counter or at least mitigate the most excessive claims of critics. Frankly, the complacency of these tech companies is kind of driving me crazy, though I have some ideas I want to push. We don't need to make people like data centers, we just need more people to utter the words "I don't like data centers, but..."
I'll paraphrase something I read on Twitter recently: Currently, 80 IQ cartel narcoterrorists have a better idea of civic duty that the tech oligarchs. When your town gets taken over by the cartel, at least they bring electricity, hospitals, running water, and a level of stability. Because even the lowest scum drug runner knows that they need to at least give something back to the community they exist in. Tech oligarchs will go into a community, drive up utility prices, and call anyone who isn't enthusiastically supportive a luddite who deserves to rot in the permanent underclass. In this way, the drug cartels are closer to the likes of John D. Rockefeller than anyone alive in Silicon Valley.
The problem with this is the electricity rate increases haven't actually materialized. They're all projections. And future impacts, in theory and in practice, fairly easy to avoid; the permitting authority has to structure things so the data center pays their own way. This should not be that hard, the data center builders currently have a lot of cash to throw around. So it amounts to a opposition talking point, like the water.
'No, in fact, you do have to give us the tax break we demanded first, or else we will sue you into the ground'.
Good luck with that one Nybbler, so long as deep pockets can hire shark lawyers to tie things up in court for years.
Now, they do have the soothing messaging out about how they won't use water, drive up energy costs, will provide tons of jobs, etc. and I'd be more inclined to believe them if they hadn't first gone for "we'll sue you into the ground and destroy you and leave you penniless if you don't zone this land for a data centre".
A guy who assures me he was only joking about cutting my throat when he had the knife to my neck may be telling the truth, but he's not going to convince me he loved me and had my best interests at heart when he threatened to cut my throat.
The lawsuit documents indicate that the situation is more complicated than that. As alleged by the company:
(1) The company buys a bunch of farmland in an agricultural zone, and applies for "conditional rezoning" to a light industrial zone with special restrictions to prevent any industry other than a data center. Apparently, conditional rezoning is, not some unusual and onerous demand, but merely Michigan's equivalent to the "conditional use" or "special exception" that one might see in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.
(2) The municipal planning commission fails to make a legitimate consideration of the application, but merely recommends in an arbitrary and capricious manner that the municipal council reject it.
(3) The municipal council rejects the application by a vote of four to one. All five members participate in the vote, even though the chair previously recused himself from discussions on this topic due to a conflict of interest.
(4) The company sues the municipal govt., under state precedent that forbids "exclusionary zoning" of a use from land that is suitable for that use. The municipal govt. settles, agreeing to approve both the conditional rezoning and a 12-year "industrial development district" tax exemption.
(5) The municipal govt. approves the tax exemption, but then removes it, in what certainly seems like an obvious contravention of the lawsuit settlement.
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That has nothing to do with this. Nybbler is saying ‘there is no need for data centres to use public electricity as long as the public authority lets them build generators’.
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I work in energy (electricity) and this is part true and part untrue. Yes, electricity prices have gone up modestly, with bigger increases projected in the next 5 years.
The reasons prices are set to increase is that we are really slow to put new generation on the grid. And the amount of data centers under construction, let alone planned, is much bigger than what is already operational.
It’s a very simple supply and demand function. Load increases faster than supply. DCs buy power through PPA contracts directly with generators. But that crowds out offtake from the generators that would otherwise go to merchant markets or supply agreements with utilities.
We are average at best at building new power supply.
I expect retail electricity prices to be electoral politics by 2030, maybe even 2028.
This feels somewhat constrained to the local regulatory environment. We can just make investments in the grid faster. In the last two decades, total US nameplate capacity is up 20-30%, while ERCOT (Texas) is up over 100%. They don't want you to know this, but you can just build things: Texas is more friendly to renewables than California these days!
But Abbot says there's too many applications for new power connections so he's not going to consider any of them. Brilliant move. Politically, anyway
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Existing electricity price increases aren't correlated to data center builds, however. And of course we're slow to put new generation on the grid; environmentalists.
Making datacenters build grid improvements is a real idea that's been floated around.
If you make them build grid improvements (which amounts to money and partnerships with existing firms which do such things; they're not going to do the actual grid improvements any more than Microsoft is restarting TMI), but don't LET them build grid improvements (because environment, safety, union work rules, etc), you've just banned them in a more complicated way.
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It’s worse than environmentalists. If it was just that I’d have some hope. It’s the bureaucracy, regulation, cost disease, NIMBYism, and a general atrophy of industrial construction capacity.
I don’t understand your point. Please elaborate. Evan assuming your point is accurate, I don’t think it matters.
You talked about how there has been no (little?) electricity price increase increase to date and that it’s only future price projections that have increased. I can assure you that when a power plant in 2026 is signing a 15-25 year power purchase agreement, those future energy price projections are the #1 thing they’re basing their price negotiations on. There’s a handful of companies that put out these projections and everyone makes long term financials decisions on them. The feedback loop on how these contracts affect the current price of power should be obvious, but I can elaborate if needed.
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I’m starting to see this as a big L for Singerite utilitarianism. Anthropic and OpenAI were both founded for an ostensibly charitable purpose. Some of this is cynical posturing, but I think most of the key people genuinely feel like they have an obligation to be charitable with the windfall from the technology they are building. A normal company fulfills their social obligation for charity by sponsoring local little league teams, the regional food bank, parks, and schools, but since Anthropic (and to an extent OpenAI) are Singerite utilitarians, they see local feel-good projects like these as “ineffective” altruism.
Would buying cans of beans for food kitchens and jerseys for the local little leagues actually help?
My gut is mostly "I don't know." But it seems plausible enough that they should have gone for it, purely for the utilitarian reason that it gives them more ability to pursue whatever their objective utility is more effectively, at a cost that would be a rounding error in their budgets.
That is very stupid, but such is life.
It's signalling, but it's signalling that demonstrates "hey, we consider ourselves part of the local community and are invested here". People trust you more when they feel like you aren't just a big faceless corporation headquartered thousands of miles away who could decide in the morning to shut down the plant, move the 1,500 jobs to China, and leave the town with the fallout of all that.
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We might as well drop your framing here and note that the thing you're suggesting they "should" be doing is bribing various local power players to discourage them from raising a stink. That isn't even ineffective altruism, it's just classic old corruption.
No, people feel like the bribing of the local power players is already baked in (e.g. big landowner gets nice windfall for selling the land, mayor etc. get nice bonuses and advantages for also being involved as estate agents and the likes (wife's cousin got $$$$$$ commission for handling the deal type corruption). They expect the officials who promise big tax breaks and re-zoning to be bought off. They also expect that when the time to pay the piper comes due, they are the ones who will be left holding the bag.
What helping the local junior sports teams and donating to charity does is spread that largesse around and give tangible benefits to plain Joe and Jill Schmoe and the little Schmoes. It may not even be a rounding error for the corporation but "the parents don't have to fundraise to pay for new jerseys and equipment this year" does make a difference to the little league team.
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This is too broad of a definition of "bribe." Food drives, little league, and the like are a way of buying good PR that's existed for the better part of the last 100 years and to a certain extent, does actually make the community better. programs like these are simply ways of reminding the community that actually, the nameless, faceless corporation that has taken over a part of the town does bring benefits to the town. For the likes of OpenAI, this type of good PR is especially important because unlike the factories of old, they don't actually bring that many jobs to the local community. When done correctly, the community itself views the company as a pillar of the community. They actually want the company to be involved in events. The loss of the company is actually seen as a loss to the community.
These guys need to offer $30/hr to wash dishes in the cafeteria. Yes, it's way above market, but it's the equivalent of spreading money around from a helicopter- people like it.
Those jobs will probably be outsourced to whatever the American equivalent of Sodexo is, but what the local economy will get is the support jobs (as The Barn promises on its website):
The "high-skill onsite jobs" will most likely go to the college educated sales, marketing, management, and AI wrangler types, but they'll need things from the local community. Like going out to cafés and restaurants and buying gas at local stations and 'is there any night life around here' and 'can I buy a cheap house' and the likes. Local farmers will hope to sell produce to the facilities management company, local employment for on-site cleaning etc. You won't get $30/hr for washing dishes in the cafeteria, but you will have the chance of "you can get flexible hours/part-time hours job locally so you can continue to run the household while your husband works full-time, but now both of you are not relying solely on his wages alone" work.
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And when these tech companies do give something back to the community or go above and beyond to mitigate externalities, they too often just don't tell anybody what they're doing. It's highly frustrating.
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