I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).
>which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
If you're wealthy, it's not a problem because you probably won't have a data center next to you. If you're poor, you're screwed.
Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.
We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.
Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.
But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.
Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”.
At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.
Or… allow it, but tax it appropriately, don’t give any subsidies, and actually require that the operators deal with the negative externalities (noise, including subsonic noise, effects on utility pricing, etc).
It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.
I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.
There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park.
I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.
0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines
Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.
The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.
I live in a muni where virtually all development is done under variance, so I'm not sure what you mean here; "peasants" get stuff all the time, in fact, my guess is most of what gets decided on is "peasants" getting stuff.
(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)
In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.
You would be surprised! Here's a fun pastime: pull up your Google Maps and scan through any McMansion district or SFH subdivision. Count how many independent businesses pop up in residential zones and at residential addresses! Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)
I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.
Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.
I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.
I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.
Zoning is currently too restrictive in the US. I believe it should be less so.
"Cautious" as I mean it exists in the space between where we are now and just throwing zoning regulations out entirely and YOLOing it.
I support significant changes, but I don't support just eliminating all regulations with no replacements and expecting "the market" to do the right thing. IMO we'd be trading one problem with another likely much more destructive one.
The NIMBY argument is generally that the current zoning system is fine (and then hiding behind it to support their NIMBY-ism).
This kind of data center opposition is part of the NIMBY playbook though. A core part of NIMBY positions is that the built environment should be purely discretionary; every change to the neighborhood should have sufficient community approval to go forward. The idea being that current residents should have veto rights over what is built in their community. Highly restrictive zoning just happens to be the method by which this land use philosophy is exercised.
Regular zoning in most of the US already covers data centers. They're highly likely only being placed in medium or heavy industrial zones. Opposing a data center despite zoning allowance is being a NIMBY. It's saying that community members should have veto rights over what gets built in their community, despite zoning and code which restricts what can be built.
Datacenters have evolved into this gigantic nuisance that are sucking up a town's water and electricity, emitting a ton of pollution, causing people's utility bills to skyrocket, and all sorts of other problems. I don't think people who are against this issue are "bootlickers". More like people who have at least a shred of empathy.
Last I was using data centers directly there was no water use, though I know now that many use water for cooling and don’t bother with a closed system because water is cheaper than the power. (Exception being Elon and gas turbines for data centers of his but that’s something you get away with doing to Texans).
I don’t get why utility bills go up when the DC should pay for the upgrades it needs for power itself.
I don’t get why people would be against them. For that matter, I don’t understand why people would be for them.
I spent many many hours in my local DC in downtown LA and you would never know it was there except the office building windows were not open to see inside.
I’m curious if you looked into the industry to see how much water and power modern data centers actually use or whether you’re just blindly accepting the popular narrative?
I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.
By this logic, anyone "begging the government" to prevent anything harmful is bootlicking.
Personally, I think bootlicking more accurately describes wanting to allow the billionaires in control of the country unlimited ability to build data centers to help destroy the fabric of society and spy, stalk, disappear and murder people with impunity.
“Hacking is letting Zuck or Musk or Nadella build shit in your backyard actually” is a fucking lame argument to make, and it’s only worse because of the misuse of the tween-on-Reddit “bootlicking” meme.
Hey, this kind of comment is not okay on HN. You've been asked before to observe the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking them. These parts of the guidelines are most relevant in this case...
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).
>which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America
Imperceptible compared to two incredibly loud things that most people wouldn't want built within a few hundred feet of their home. Some of the defenses of these datacenters in this thread are so poorly framed that it makes me wonder who actually wrote them.
[dead]
Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.
>AI is on track to become the next Concorde
A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?
If you had a data center in your backyard you'd change your mind on this one suuuuuper fast.
If you're wealthy, it's not a problem because you probably won't have a data center next to you. If you're poor, you're screwed.
Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.
We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.
Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.
But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.
NoVA is one of the richest areas of the entire country and is loaded with data centers.
You can make this argument for any industrial building.
Do you want to live next to one? Or do you think that honor should go to poor people?
Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...
Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”.
At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.
Or… allow it, but tax it appropriately, don’t give any subsidies, and actually require that the operators deal with the negative externalities (noise, including subsonic noise, effects on utility pricing, etc).
It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.
I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.
You would think and I’m definitely with you on your method.
I’m just spitballing here, but how about a commercial property tax?
Unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee that any of that is actually used to offset any of the negatives these things bring with them.
There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park.
I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.
0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines
Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.
The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.
I live in a muni where virtually all development is done under variance, so I'm not sure what you mean here; "peasants" get stuff all the time, in fact, my guess is most of what gets decided on is "peasants" getting stuff.
(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)
In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.
You would be surprised! Here's a fun pastime: pull up your Google Maps and scan through any McMansion district or SFH subdivision. Count how many independent businesses pop up in residential zones and at residential addresses! Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)
I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.
Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?
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I don't want this garbage in anyone's "backyard", mine or not.
I want it in my back yard. Commercial and industrial interests make great neighbors.
NIMBY-ism/anti-NIMBY-ism isn't all or nothing.
I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.
I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.
I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.
"Cautious" modifications to zoning is a NIMBY argument, just for what it's worth.
That's such an oversimplified thing to say. And how much work are those quotes doing?
I don't agree, and none.
Zoning is currently too restrictive in the US. I believe it should be less so.
"Cautious" as I mean it exists in the space between where we are now and just throwing zoning regulations out entirely and YOLOing it.
I support significant changes, but I don't support just eliminating all regulations with no replacements and expecting "the market" to do the right thing. IMO we'd be trading one problem with another likely much more destructive one.
The NIMBY argument is generally that the current zoning system is fine (and then hiding behind it to support their NIMBY-ism).
Why not throw almost all zoning regulations out besides some designations for what areas can be used for industrial uses?
The status quo of zoning basically just stops people from living and working where they want to.
This kind of data center opposition is part of the NIMBY playbook though. A core part of NIMBY positions is that the built environment should be purely discretionary; every change to the neighborhood should have sufficient community approval to go forward. The idea being that current residents should have veto rights over what is built in their community. Highly restrictive zoning just happens to be the method by which this land use philosophy is exercised.
Regular zoning in most of the US already covers data centers. They're highly likely only being placed in medium or heavy industrial zones. Opposing a data center despite zoning allowance is being a NIMBY. It's saying that community members should have veto rights over what gets built in their community, despite zoning and code which restricts what can be built.
Equating this shit with a NIMBY argument is unequivocally dishonest.
I don’t want any more shitty AI data centers anywhere. Sorry that that negatively impacts your totally awesome start-up.
[flagged]
Everyone's just arguing about the seasonings.
Datacenters have evolved into this gigantic nuisance that are sucking up a town's water and electricity, emitting a ton of pollution, causing people's utility bills to skyrocket, and all sorts of other problems. I don't think people who are against this issue are "bootlickers". More like people who have at least a shred of empathy.
What pollution?
Last I was using data centers directly there was no water use, though I know now that many use water for cooling and don’t bother with a closed system because water is cheaper than the power. (Exception being Elon and gas turbines for data centers of his but that’s something you get away with doing to Texans).
I don’t get why utility bills go up when the DC should pay for the upgrades it needs for power itself.
I don’t get why people would be against them. For that matter, I don’t understand why people would be for them.
I spent many many hours in my local DC in downtown LA and you would never know it was there except the office building windows were not open to see inside.
I’m curious if you looked into the industry to see how much water and power modern data centers actually use or whether you’re just blindly accepting the popular narrative?
I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.
By this logic, anyone "begging the government" to prevent anything harmful is bootlicking.
Personally, I think bootlicking more accurately describes wanting to allow the billionaires in control of the country unlimited ability to build data centers to help destroy the fabric of society and spy, stalk, disappear and murder people with impunity.
“Hacking is letting Zuck or Musk or Nadella build shit in your backyard actually” is a fucking lame argument to make, and it’s only worse because of the misuse of the tween-on-Reddit “bootlicking” meme.
Do VC boots taste better than government boots or something?
Unlike solar and wind power, some people don't want AI data centers in any neighborhood.
most people have no idea where their apps come from. they think it all happens on their phone. this is why we can't have nice things.
We aren't building dozens of new datacenters to host more webapps.
[flagged]
Hey, this kind of comment is not okay on HN. You've been asked before to observe the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking them. These parts of the guidelines are most relevant in this case...
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html