In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
I despise the argument that they always use, saying “It’ll bring in tax revenue”
No it fucking won’t. The people who own these things DON’T PAY TAXES. Going out of their way to AVOID paying taxes is their entire deal!
If there is one bright side to all of this recent “affordability” crisis, is that I think more and more people are getting affected enough now that they’re FINALLY starting to focus their gaze on the billionaires and the politicians who are bought by them. (Maybe that’s optimism).
Don’t get me wrong, most of them still obediently ALSO blame immigrants, trans folk, homeless people, etc… whoever the billionaires and politicians TELL them to blame, but they’re finally beginning to look in the upper direction too.
That is actually the opposite argument as this project had. We’ll never know the full truth because in the Utah legislature the Republicans exempted themselves from FOIA/GRAMA requests. What it looks like happened based on the emails and records we do have is the Republican House Leader Stuart Adams (a land developer) bought 640 acres of waterless desert land for $10. He then tried to lure the data center to the land next to his by promising Kevin O’Leary it would be tax exempt. This would have made his plot exponentially more valuable.
The local county (about 50,000 cattle and peach farmers) government calculated the data center would cost the county government about $5 million per year because they’d be on the hook for police, fire, ambulance, water, sewer, snow removal, road maintenance etc. The county government didn’t think it was a fair deal for them so they got O’Leary to agree to a one time payment of $20 million, long enough for these local Republicans to win reelection and then everyone forget by the next cycle.
Fun fact O’Leary originally proposed a solar, wind, and battery powered data center but the state level Republicans put a condition on approval that it must be fossil fuel powered. The Utah Way!
“It’ll bring in tax revenue”
No it fucking won’t. The people who own these things DON’T PAY TAXES.
Hahaa, my union’s about ready to kick me out for saying this. From the very top of the UA, every trade is about to get fuuucked, and we’re just waltzing right on into it.
Good. Data centers are toxic to the environment, to the public, and to public life; they should be toxic to politicians as well.
Edit: I love this line from the article:
“None of this would matter if voters liked what they were getting from the data centers, but they don’t see the benefit. ‘You’ll pay higher energy prices, but either you’ll lose your job or your 401k will collapse’ isn’t a deal most voters are eager to take,” Cassino added.
Ironic a man named Cassino lost his gamble because people were afraid of losing money.
He is just a college professor/pollster.
And here you are interacting with the help of datacenters.
There is a tiny bit of a difference between a “normal” data center with your typical web stack and a data center filled with GPU’s spending megawatts to confidently tell you that its alright to eat staples while raising your electricity bill, exhausting the water table, and providing no meaningful value.
True, but 9 times out of 10 you don’t see the distinction in the comments, it’s only “datacenters”.
I do feel bad for the “normal” companies that are general purpose data center and colo providers that are basically doomed to never being able to expand because of this shit show.
AI facilities should be rebranded as “slop farms” or “slop pens”. I think it would be pretty easy to isolate them as a normal facility might top out in the 1-2 megawatt neighborhood while a slop farm is going to need that just for the pumps and exchange fans for its cooling system. Just rough numbers but the two have extremely different requests to operate power requirements.
Please state your argument more clearly
tracert
Utah has 2 or 3 of the largest wildfires in the US right now. We are also out of water. Literally they said of one of the fires that they ran out of water on the mountain and to stay away until they could manage to find more. The data center in question was proposed to be the size of Manhattan. And use more power then the entire state currently does. One idiotic building. This dude was a piece of shit before, but the idiot voters in his district still supported him. But once this came out even they broke. Fuck these assholes. Vote them all out.
Its worth noting that even if that data centre used closed loop cooling, generating all that power requires lots of water (like most generating stations, including coal and gas) or use combustion turbine generators that pollutes like crazy.
This is foreshadowing that hubris ignores. A wildfire will take out the huge data center and it will have used up all the water to cool itself instead of quench the fire.
God that would be amazing.
what about all that groundwater the mormons are pumping out of heber? like 180,000 gallons a day for their clubhouse? they use ALL of that?
Heber is pretty far from this particular fire.
oh i thought we were also highlighting state mismanagement of water, withdrawn
I mean that’s a given. It infuriated me last year when we had one good winter and the state threw out all it’s plans and demands for water management. Then this winter hit and I said to many people that the fires were going to be very bad. We have reservoirs that are sitting under 20% full for years now. But it sounds like you may live here as well and are aware of this.
used to live there, keep up with news to see how old friends are doing. one of the places they hold one of the big festivals out by heber is my family’s old farm. it’s a godsdamned golf course now.
Thank God this guy was such a piece of shit
Is this a uniquely American situation or are other major players building out AI infrastructure facing hash backlash? Like is there big issues around data centers in the UK, Israel, China, or India as well?
The data centers in the US are going up at such a speed that there is little to no public feedback allowed on any proposals. Once built the data center only provides a single digit number of jobs while raising the price of electricity in the region (typically by a very significant increase) and creating a low level audio hum that is below human hearing but still causes physiological effects.
The end result is American data centers ignore the public, cost them more money, provides no benefit, and physically hurts the community while operational. Most European data centers have to contend with build codes and councils, paying specific attention to community impact. Not in America. They just go up and make everything else cost more.
That’s a fair take. Any similarity or difference to the US’s primary AI competitor (China)? I’ve seen the EU is now concerned by the US lead on AI and may possibly slide on regulations a little to play catch-up but that’s yet to be seen.
America also seems to be placing these based on local tax situations, not local resources or community impact. Since China is more centrallized, I’d imagine they place them with a different strategy.
Of course both nations have immanent domain, it’s a bit more difficult to justify its use in the US from my understanding. In China aren’t companies ultimately controlled or owned by the government? So if the government feels it’s of a national benefit or security I don’t think there would be as much in the way.
There’s a fight against them up here in Canada, but the US really is trying to speed run the heat death of the world
I’m mostly curious about the two primary players in the AI race, that being the US and China. I’m assuming there’s equivalent backlash or decreased backlash due to better regulations in Canada / UK / EU / Australia. Things seem unusually quiet about news of China building out their data centers or backlash by their citizens about it.
Control the media.
Suppress any mention of new datacenters.
No backlash.Its just a more developed problem in the U. S. Because the industry is bigger and further along. Its coming everywhere (barring a pop).
I also feel like we might not be hearing the whole situation from other countries with tighter media regulations.
“Hash backlash” is a great tagline for people disliking datacenters. Too bad they’re not actually doing any cryptography lol
