I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.
If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.
Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.
You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.
What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’m always a bit baffled by someone saying “Please don’t invest $5B and create 100s of jobs and taxable improvements in my back yard”.
This is a common argument: wanting 1000s of jobs during construction and 1000s of jobs after construction, but this isn’t a car manufacturing plant. That’s a “we want our cake and we want to eat it too” argument — not saying it’s your argument just that this comes up frequently.
Not being able to steal from whites as easily as you can steal from blacks is literally white supremacy actually, so to be a good ally everybody has to let Microsoft build a datacenter in their backyard. YIMBYs rule!