Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.
The Catskills have those environmental protection laws because they are the water source for NYC. It would be very stupid to relax those to build data centers.
NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change.
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
> We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
Exactly. Towns are also increasingly nervous that when the bottom drops out of the AI bubble they’ll be left with abandoned half-built data centers blighting their communities. It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible.
Let's be honest. There is a way to safely build data centers. Sensible laws could be made for them to build enough solar so they can power themselves or they are responsible for the cost of increasing capacity. Things like environmental impact and pollution need to be taken into account. However, since this is America, that won't happen. So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
> So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
I live in a red state; my electricity bill went up 40% (flat rate annual billing), but my consumption only went up 10%. Local newspaper reports that this is because of data centers.
I typically don't vote for Republicans, and I typically do vote for environmental protection. However, my state is heavily gerrymandered by the Republican supermajority here.
So, I don't really have a choice.
Also, go fuck yourself for being so glib about an entire state's population and wishing them ill.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Ny also for as long as I've been here, does not try to have first mover advantage. The state really does usually show up second or third to the party. So to speak.
why are we talking about bernie sanders in the context of new york state? he's a US senator from vermont. this is state-level politics, not federal, in the state of new york, not vermont. and he's not mentioned once in this article?
This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.
Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
>The state currently has more than 130 data centers, according to Data Center Map, compared with more than 600 in Virginia and about 500 in Texas.
Texas is physically larger and 'business frienedly' so suspect they will be getting a lot more.
Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Data warehouse company.
Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
> I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS
They would build them as close to NYC as possible. Data Centers existed prior to AI boom. HFT, edge hosting, etc.
That's the insider joke. Look up NY1-NY4 data centers, they are all in NJ across the river. NYC just dump their shit into NJ is the usually move. But those areas are full now, and they don't really have anywhere to go but south jersey.
The Catskills have those environmental protection laws because they are the water source for NYC. It would be very stupid to relax those to build data centers.
NYC owns those lands for water. ADK has forever wild in NYS constitution. They are not gonna get relax for data center because they discharge water and noise and add significant infrastructure change.
Solar farm on the other hand might go up tho.
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.
Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?
> We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds
According to one Canadian, er sorry, a UE citizen, er sorry, an Irishman named Kevin O'Leary, who is seeing Chinese spys everywhere, we actually do need to move with breakneck speed, because otherwise the quality of American lives will be forever gone. Or at least infuse of naive VC money flowing into his pockets will be gone.
Exactly. Towns are also increasingly nervous that when the bottom drops out of the AI bubble they’ll be left with abandoned half-built data centers blighting their communities. It’s a serious concern that looks increasingly plausible.
Even a completed one has limited use to other industries
Let's be honest. There is a way to safely build data centers. Sensible laws could be made for them to build enough solar so they can power themselves or they are responsible for the cost of increasing capacity. Things like environmental impact and pollution need to be taken into account. However, since this is America, that won't happen. So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
> So companies will build these data centers in red states with little to no regulation and those people will pay for the increase in power capacity, the environmental and public health damages, etc...
Good. People in red state have been voting to shit on the environment for longer than I have been alive, and they can have all the data centers.
I live in a red state; my electricity bill went up 40% (flat rate annual billing), but my consumption only went up 10%. Local newspaper reports that this is because of data centers.
I typically don't vote for Republicans, and I typically do vote for environmental protection. However, my state is heavily gerrymandered by the Republican supermajority here.
So, I don't really have a choice.
Also, go fuck yourself for being so glib about an entire state's population and wishing them ill.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
Ny also for as long as I've been here, does not try to have first mover advantage. The state really does usually show up second or third to the party. So to speak.
why are we talking about bernie sanders in the context of new york state? he's a US senator from vermont. this is state-level politics, not federal, in the state of new york, not vermont. and he's not mentioned once in this article?
> I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these
Perhaps the majority of people in Vermont want him to be vocal about it and he is simply doing his actual job.
AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.
This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.
This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.
Finally, we are free from the tyranny of Glonzo.
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.
I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.
There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?
Your closer to a 2/3 and 1/3 split then a coin flip with 60%.
You handwaved that 40% to a positive. This could easily mean very few people have a positive view of AI.
In US politics at least that’s plenty to shut things down, which is exactly what’s happening.
It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.
Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.
More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.
99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.
Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
</sarcasm>
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.