It's definitely a lot of this. The AI companies have to be salesmen, and they are showing up on doorsteps in places ringing doorbells. It's hard to not be pre-anchored to "how is this guy going to screw me?" when you open the door.
The conversation (and the original post) are missing a big part of the cultural history here. How many films, Netflix series, bestselling fiction and nonfiction books have we all enjoyed over the last forty years or so where The Corporation has dumped its poison waste/killed its workers or customers/ lied and cheated to make a billion dollars/destroyed your home and paid no taxes? And all of them ‘based on a true story’. This is a strong subsection of modern cultural drama, and stronger still because each time you think ‘..but that was before consumer law came in to make it better’, you find another bunch of criminals are up to it again, right now. And this time, the villains are openly telling us how they’re going to operate, with their NDAs and their claims for future comprehensive job destruction. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and then there’s the ‘military applications’, aka death robots loose on your streets… Count me in with the rubes too.
"Also it will be very loud, and it will require a lot of electrical transmission infrastructure to be built, of which you will help share the cost in your rates. It will dramatically increase the consumption of local water resources, but I'm sure the current drought will end soon. It will have a handful of lower-paid employees to swap failed equipment out while the highly paid engineers will manage things from other states or countries, so any payroll effect to the local economy will be negligible. We cut a great deal with your local government to have lower property taxes for the first X years, after which we'll pay full property taxes but it will be EOL by then so we'll just sell it and build a new one in a new community with different rubes who don't know the game yet."
They won't even spend a few % more to make them not look like crap and have sufficient setbacks to remove the noise complaint issues. I'm pretty sure a local farmer built a 500 meter, ~15 foot high berm to marginally improve his deer hunting. Kinda feels like if a random farmer can build a 500 meter/15 foot high berm, then a massive AI company can set back the building an extra ~150 feet and do forested berms/combo walls around the buildings to drop the noise on neighboring parcels.
A few local to me data center proposals have been literally within a hefty stone's throw of houses/yards. What. The. Heck. Surely there are places where it can have power/other inputs and be set back decently/surrounded with a planted berm.
It almost feels like they want them to be as ugly and visible as possible so that not only are they better than the rubes, but the rubes have to know it as well.
The politics turning into a runaway train is what we should hope for. Do you guys want a mass movement or not? If the answers yes then you gotta settle for “data center is bad” cuz no mass movement is ever gonna be “RLHF causes misalignment, down with instrumental convergence”.
Can you? It’s not working very well on the climate change issue in Europe. All they accomplish is moral grandstanding as they make themselves irrelevant and export the global issue elsewhere.
Parochial politics has no impact on China, India, or most of the world for that matter.
If the only place that companies can build next generation data centers is in countries that neither the US nor China likes very much, then this "reduces to a previously solved problem", as the mathematicians put it. Data centers, their power generation infrastructure and their chip fabs are large, expensive, vulnerable facilities, much like uranium enrichment operations. If the US and China ever jointly agree that next-generation AI risks causing human extinction, I'm sure they can stop it for a while.
Great post. I really think the most important part of Jasmine's piece was the point she makes about "data centers as the stage for thymos" — as places for where the expression and demonstration of essential dignity and worth can play out. And, as I talk about in my followup piece to the one you linked to, it's just *extremely clear* to me (as it is with universities) that that *ordinal outcome of dignity recognition* is not an OKR for the relevant players. I think until it is, most of the putative solutions will miss by aiming to treat the symptoms, and will do so in a credibility-devouring way that makes the problem worse.
Is it instrumentally useful to cluster all datacenters in compact area in the United States?
Benefits: efficiency of infrastructure (including power) build-out and logistics, minimization of impingement into local communities, and -- most importantly -- a slim chance to nuke it in one go inresponse to nascent AI takeover (I don't strongly expect this to work and at most it would be worth a few % in responsiveness increase, but a few % as against the extinction of all life seems good?)
Costs: easy target in the context of international warfare? No local tax revenues to those hosting datacenters? Instrumental ease of physical destruction not enough of a needle-mover on X-risks to warrant the inconvenience? Too easy for the AIs to guard themselves using autonomous systems to turn the city of 01 into an impregnable fortress? Something something terrorism target? (That last seems unlikely to me to matter. The physical footprint of even a single datacenter seems too big to do serious damage to without access to nation-state level resources.)
Is there really such a thing as “a compact area in the US”? Fly over this country and there are simply massive possibilities for places to put a DC. There are windmill farms and massive solar panel fields hundreds of miles between Phoenix and SoCal. Literally nobody lives anywhere remotely near there (or wants to). Help elect a local politician and promise rebates on energy to the few people that live nearby and they will laugh all the way to the bank.
I guess my question is whether this is a real problem at all. Even if 75% of the places suitable for a DC were prohibited, there still seems to be a million great places in the US left over.
I would love to hear from the people actually building these things. Sure opposition and bad vibes is an inconvenience and a minor added expense. But is it a roadblock or more of a speed bump?
I'm assuming you'd put it in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap in order to make it easy to build additional datacenters and powerplants nearby without noise or other nuisance impact, so there would be no one to really benefit from tax extraction. Also less risk if you want to rig them all with explosive killswitches or something.
Unfortunately many jurisdictions grant massive tax breaks that offset the gains after construction is over in 3-5 years. Take the Louisiana example of the big bonuses for teachers. That sales tax revenue is a short term burst because it's from construction workers spending money but Louisiana exempts the hardware from sales tax for 30 years and gives an 80% property tax break for 10 years for 50 long term jobs.
Whether there is any significant long term tax revenue is very location dependent. Loudoun specifically implements tax policies that benefit the community long term that they can do as a result of real world location benefits of having a major fiber network location, being close to New York and Washington DC, etc. If you are trying to put all the data centers in say South Dakota competing against Wyoming, all they really have is tax incentives, meaning there's not going to be much tax revenue after the construction is complete.
Well, perhaps somewhere between "no one wants a data center near them at any price", and "multiple places are competing for data centers by lowering taxes", there will be a middle ground of "someone gets a bunch of tax revenue for hosting data centers".
If we're going to have them that would be nice. But alas between the tech bros hating the very states that let them accumulate obscene wealth and people still believing after 40 plus years of chopping corporate taxes it will this time spur wide spread income growth and not increase income inequality, I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
A little tongue-in-cheek, but what if they simply created a new name for "data centers"? e.g., like life insurance for death insurance or gas development for fracking? Focus groups and concept tests could explore reactions to "thinking resources," "intelligence exchange," "compute station/commons," or "knowledge works"? Unlikely to sway opinion much if electricity bills, water tables, noise, tax giveaways, etc. become real problems.
Whether you love or hate it, this administration has created tumult in America and I wonder if that background of disruption adds intensity to anti-data center sentiment. I can imagine how citizens already reeling from healthcare cuts, ICE controversy, high gas and grocery costs, the visible influence of big business on politics, an ongoing war etc. might simply land on: "NOPE! Not another thing to add to the disruption." This suggests that finding equilibrium on these other matters might free societal bandwidth to discuss AI/data centers more generously and hopefully vs. defensively.
This captures my feelings on it pretty well. I'm reasonably agi/asi pilled, but I don't know much about economics. I do very much worry that the economic gains will not be seen by most people, especially if they don't have a job. The fact that poverty still exists despite the massive abundance we have is very telling imo. People say the abundance is from the "efficiency" of capitalism, but imo it could just as well be the industrial revolution.
And I also think that the concerns on data and privacy are extremely valid. There are too many unjust laws on the books, so even people who should have nothing to hide should be very afraid of the government. Not to mention more "minor" issues like Flock cameras being used for stalking.
Whether those points cash out as data centers being net bad, I do not know. But I would like to see something in place to prepare for job loss before we dramatically scale up. Maybe a ubi? Idk, I don't understand the economy.
I think the anti-data center movement is less rationally concerned with "stopping AI" - yes, there are out-and-proud anti-AI activists, but the data center people seem to really just don't want a data center near them, because both the data center and the AI are Bad Things, and you don't want Bad Things around.
As I wrote elsewhere, the unspoken sentiment seems to be: "There is a new, frightening inhuman thing, built by powerful people whose values we don't share, occupying our scarce land with ominous-looking evil fortresses, draining our precious lifeblood, planning to disempower and replace us / wasting the world's finite resources on a frivolous scam, and obviously polluting the soil and air in the process." They're not waging a political battle against it, they just want to preserve their local purity.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Usually, when someone says 'We have an [X] problem', it is usually when the writer thinks we have too many / too much of the [X], rather than too little. When the writer thinks we have too few / too little [X], I think it is at least unusual enough that an extra clarifying word, e.g.
"We have a huge YIMBY _shortage_ problem..." would help.
Anecdote intended to compliment rather than contradict:
In my neighborhood (~5K homes, mix of single family and townhomes) there was an enormous recent backlash about power lines. A few miles a way a nice juicy plot of land has data centers being actively built on it but they need to run additional transmission lines to a nearby station.
So comes a plan to run lines through the middle of our neighborhood, while also bisecting a county park and taking some wetland with it for good measure. I'm also generally pro-data center, but when it came to the beautiful trail by the river that I walk almost daily, it was impossible for me to get out of the framing of "we are going to chop down a forest so we can watch more AI-generated videos of beautiful places on Instagram" and it makes me sick.
add to that: "But if WE don't destroy the world first, CHINA will destroy the world first"
It's definitely a lot of this. The AI companies have to be salesmen, and they are showing up on doorsteps in places ringing doorbells. It's hard to not be pre-anchored to "how is this guy going to screw me?" when you open the door.
The conversation (and the original post) are missing a big part of the cultural history here. How many films, Netflix series, bestselling fiction and nonfiction books have we all enjoyed over the last forty years or so where The Corporation has dumped its poison waste/killed its workers or customers/ lied and cheated to make a billion dollars/destroyed your home and paid no taxes? And all of them ‘based on a true story’. This is a strong subsection of modern cultural drama, and stronger still because each time you think ‘..but that was before consumer law came in to make it better’, you find another bunch of criminals are up to it again, right now. And this time, the villains are openly telling us how they’re going to operate, with their NDAs and their claims for future comprehensive job destruction. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and then there’s the ‘military applications’, aka death robots loose on your streets… Count me in with the rubes too.
"Also it will be very loud, and it will require a lot of electrical transmission infrastructure to be built, of which you will help share the cost in your rates. It will dramatically increase the consumption of local water resources, but I'm sure the current drought will end soon. It will have a handful of lower-paid employees to swap failed equipment out while the highly paid engineers will manage things from other states or countries, so any payroll effect to the local economy will be negligible. We cut a great deal with your local government to have lower property taxes for the first X years, after which we'll pay full property taxes but it will be EOL by then so we'll just sell it and build a new one in a new community with different rubes who don't know the game yet."
They won't even spend a few % more to make them not look like crap and have sufficient setbacks to remove the noise complaint issues. I'm pretty sure a local farmer built a 500 meter, ~15 foot high berm to marginally improve his deer hunting. Kinda feels like if a random farmer can build a 500 meter/15 foot high berm, then a massive AI company can set back the building an extra ~150 feet and do forested berms/combo walls around the buildings to drop the noise on neighboring parcels.
A few local to me data center proposals have been literally within a hefty stone's throw of houses/yards. What. The. Heck. Surely there are places where it can have power/other inputs and be set back decently/surrounded with a planted berm.
It almost feels like they want them to be as ugly and visible as possible so that not only are they better than the rubes, but the rubes have to know it as well.
The politics turning into a runaway train is what we should hope for. Do you guys want a mass movement or not? If the answers yes then you gotta settle for “data center is bad” cuz no mass movement is ever gonna be “RLHF causes misalignment, down with instrumental convergence”.
We should not hope they build data centers in another country. You don’t use parochial politics to address planetary problems.
But you can use parochial politics to build support for planetary problems.
Can you? It’s not working very well on the climate change issue in Europe. All they accomplish is moral grandstanding as they make themselves irrelevant and export the global issue elsewhere.
Parochial politics has no impact on China, India, or most of the world for that matter.
If the only place that companies can build next generation data centers is in countries that neither the US nor China likes very much, then this "reduces to a previously solved problem", as the mathematicians put it. Data centers, their power generation infrastructure and their chip fabs are large, expensive, vulnerable facilities, much like uranium enrichment operations. If the US and China ever jointly agree that next-generation AI risks causing human extinction, I'm sure they can stop it for a while.
Yes, I would consider this a global solution to a global problem (or alternatively one could argue a global constraint to a global opportunity).
Great post. I really think the most important part of Jasmine's piece was the point she makes about "data centers as the stage for thymos" — as places for where the expression and demonstration of essential dignity and worth can play out. And, as I talk about in my followup piece to the one you linked to, it's just *extremely clear* to me (as it is with universities) that that *ordinal outcome of dignity recognition* is not an OKR for the relevant players. I think until it is, most of the putative solutions will miss by aiming to treat the symptoms, and will do so in a credibility-devouring way that makes the problem worse.
"A few small repairs" aren't going to cut it. https://zachill.substack.com/p/a-few-small-repairs
Is it instrumentally useful to cluster all datacenters in compact area in the United States?
Benefits: efficiency of infrastructure (including power) build-out and logistics, minimization of impingement into local communities, and -- most importantly -- a slim chance to nuke it in one go inresponse to nascent AI takeover (I don't strongly expect this to work and at most it would be worth a few % in responsiveness increase, but a few % as against the extinction of all life seems good?)
Costs: easy target in the context of international warfare? No local tax revenues to those hosting datacenters? Instrumental ease of physical destruction not enough of a needle-mover on X-risks to warrant the inconvenience? Too easy for the AIs to guard themselves using autonomous systems to turn the city of 01 into an impregnable fortress? Something something terrorism target? (That last seems unlikely to me to matter. The physical footprint of even a single datacenter seems too big to do serious damage to without access to nation-state level resources.)
Is there really such a thing as “a compact area in the US”? Fly over this country and there are simply massive possibilities for places to put a DC. There are windmill farms and massive solar panel fields hundreds of miles between Phoenix and SoCal. Literally nobody lives anywhere remotely near there (or wants to). Help elect a local politician and promise rebates on energy to the few people that live nearby and they will laugh all the way to the bank.
I guess my question is whether this is a real problem at all. Even if 75% of the places suitable for a DC were prohibited, there still seems to be a million great places in the US left over.
I would love to hear from the people actually building these things. Sure opposition and bad vibes is an inconvenience and a minor added expense. But is it a roadblock or more of a speed bump?
Who says there is no local tax revenue? Loudon County, VA raked in a billion dollars last year.
I'm assuming you'd put it in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap in order to make it easy to build additional datacenters and powerplants nearby without noise or other nuisance impact, so there would be no one to really benefit from tax extraction. Also less risk if you want to rig them all with explosive killswitches or something.
Unfortunately many jurisdictions grant massive tax breaks that offset the gains after construction is over in 3-5 years. Take the Louisiana example of the big bonuses for teachers. That sales tax revenue is a short term burst because it's from construction workers spending money but Louisiana exempts the hardware from sales tax for 30 years and gives an 80% property tax break for 10 years for 50 long term jobs.
Whether there is any significant long term tax revenue is very location dependent. Loudoun specifically implements tax policies that benefit the community long term that they can do as a result of real world location benefits of having a major fiber network location, being close to New York and Washington DC, etc. If you are trying to put all the data centers in say South Dakota competing against Wyoming, all they really have is tax incentives, meaning there's not going to be much tax revenue after the construction is complete.
Well, perhaps somewhere between "no one wants a data center near them at any price", and "multiple places are competing for data centers by lowering taxes", there will be a middle ground of "someone gets a bunch of tax revenue for hosting data centers".
If we're going to have them that would be nice. But alas between the tech bros hating the very states that let them accumulate obscene wealth and people still believing after 40 plus years of chopping corporate taxes it will this time spur wide spread income growth and not increase income inequality, I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
A little tongue-in-cheek, but what if they simply created a new name for "data centers"? e.g., like life insurance for death insurance or gas development for fracking? Focus groups and concept tests could explore reactions to "thinking resources," "intelligence exchange," "compute station/commons," or "knowledge works"? Unlikely to sway opinion much if electricity bills, water tables, noise, tax giveaways, etc. become real problems.
Let's not overcomplicate things. It's a warehouse. Let's just call it a warehouse.
Some warehouses store car parts. These one store computers.
"That level of concern seems right, but young people oppose data centers more than old ones, so it mostly isn’t about lack of tech proficiency."
I would be more careful about this: As tech becomes more common/designed to be intuitive, young people are less tech proficient than before
Whether you love or hate it, this administration has created tumult in America and I wonder if that background of disruption adds intensity to anti-data center sentiment. I can imagine how citizens already reeling from healthcare cuts, ICE controversy, high gas and grocery costs, the visible influence of big business on politics, an ongoing war etc. might simply land on: "NOPE! Not another thing to add to the disruption." This suggests that finding equilibrium on these other matters might free societal bandwidth to discuss AI/data centers more generously and hopefully vs. defensively.
The American public will never be satisfied.
I have a marketing background and see how to improve the messaging…
The basic idea is a malicious looking robot pointing a finger and saying “Allow us to build Data Centers and we promise to kill you last.”
Why should anyone build any data centers when we're going to have to raze them after the robots rebel?
"If we say no to datacenters, they will just build them somewhere else"
As Zvi would say: Not with that attitude
This captures my feelings on it pretty well. I'm reasonably agi/asi pilled, but I don't know much about economics. I do very much worry that the economic gains will not be seen by most people, especially if they don't have a job. The fact that poverty still exists despite the massive abundance we have is very telling imo. People say the abundance is from the "efficiency" of capitalism, but imo it could just as well be the industrial revolution.
And I also think that the concerns on data and privacy are extremely valid. There are too many unjust laws on the books, so even people who should have nothing to hide should be very afraid of the government. Not to mention more "minor" issues like Flock cameras being used for stalking.
Whether those points cash out as data centers being net bad, I do not know. But I would like to see something in place to prepare for job loss before we dramatically scale up. Maybe a ubi? Idk, I don't understand the economy.
I think the anti-data center movement is less rationally concerned with "stopping AI" - yes, there are out-and-proud anti-AI activists, but the data center people seem to really just don't want a data center near them, because both the data center and the AI are Bad Things, and you don't want Bad Things around.
As I wrote elsewhere, the unspoken sentiment seems to be: "There is a new, frightening inhuman thing, built by powerful people whose values we don't share, occupying our scarce land with ominous-looking evil fortresses, draining our precious lifeblood, planning to disempower and replace us / wasting the world's finite resources on a frivolous scam, and obviously polluting the soil and air in the process." They're not waging a political battle against it, they just want to preserve their local purity.
<mildSnark>
"they just want to preserve their local purity"
Shades of Gen Jack D. Ripper :-)
</mildSnark>
( If data centers were lead smelters I would be more sympathetic, but they are large scale versions of office equipment. )
I definitely think that Americans would care less about data centres if they weren't being built on their own soil (rather in Chile, Argentina, etc.)
based on my Argentinian priors
It's all about trust.
We trusted silicon valley too much during the social media & smartphone boom. They got rich, we got mounting social costs.
No one trusts them this time.
"We have a huge YIMBY problem even for things like houses."
typo? Normally trivial, but if YIMBY was supposed to be NIMBY it reverses the meaning.
I think it means the same thing - the YIMBY problem is we don’t have enough YIMBYs while the NIMBY problem is we have too many NIMBYs.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Usually, when someone says 'We have an [X] problem', it is usually when the writer thinks we have too many / too much of the [X], rather than too little. When the writer thinks we have too few / too little [X], I think it is at least unusual enough that an extra clarifying word, e.g.
"We have a huge YIMBY _shortage_ problem..." would help.
Anecdote intended to compliment rather than contradict:
In my neighborhood (~5K homes, mix of single family and townhomes) there was an enormous recent backlash about power lines. A few miles a way a nice juicy plot of land has data centers being actively built on it but they need to run additional transmission lines to a nearby station.
So comes a plan to run lines through the middle of our neighborhood, while also bisecting a county park and taking some wetland with it for good measure. I'm also generally pro-data center, but when it came to the beautiful trail by the river that I walk almost daily, it was impossible for me to get out of the framing of "we are going to chop down a forest so we can watch more AI-generated videos of beautiful places on Instagram" and it makes me sick.