Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
(wpr.org)334 points by sseagull 2 days ago
334 points by sseagull 2 days ago
What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.
They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.
Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.
The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.
The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.
I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It’s easy to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The why is the American development pattern that creates suburbia that can’t generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.
That’s the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in large part, fix the problem.
However the conspiracy-theory nutters have done a really good job convincing people in the US that 15-minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, "cities", are some plot by George Soros to... actually I have no idea what sort of crazy is being invoked this time, but it seems to have worked, generating enough opposition to liveable cities to make it a real uphill battle to implement them.
Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates.
https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...
IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).
What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.
Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all.
You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.
Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...
Unfortunately for the rust belt states data centers don't bring in a lot of jobs.
No well educated highly paid person wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Wisconsin will never be Seattle, Boston or NYC.
Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.
When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."
I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.
If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.
Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.
---
Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?
If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.
> Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."
Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!
> why it was needed in ...
"Needed"
I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.
it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.
I'm not sure. Cities are supposed to approve or deny applications based on whether they comply with zoning, codes, parking, water availability etc. They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone. A city near me is dealing with a lawsuit for exactly that.
It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.
I was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply changed their minds/laws.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-county-...
> In 2016, West Jordan City sought to land a Facebook data center by offering large tax incentives to the social media giant. That deal ultimately fell through amid opposition by Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and a vote of conditional support by the Utah Board of Education that sought to cap the company’s tax benefits.
> That project went to New Mexico, which was offering even richer incentives.
> Three months after the Utah negotiations ended, state lawmakers voted in a special session to approve a sales tax exemption for data centers. The move was seen by many as another attempt to woo Facebook to the Beehive State.
So basically they first said "No", lost the bid, had FOMO so they passed new laws to attract this business.
>Asked about the identity of the company, Foxley said only that it is “a major technology company that wants to bring a data center to Utah.”
>And that vision could soon be a reality, after members of the Utah County Commission voted Tuesday to approve roughly $150 million in property tax incentives to lure an as-yet-unnamed company — that sounds an awful lot like Facebook — to the southern end of Pony Express Parkway.
Seems like a pretty open and obvious secret.
I admit I may be missing broader context about the state, this was specifically from someone working for Eagle Mountain city planning. But the article you've cited is later in the process than what I'm talking about.
This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.
Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.
Typically constituents don’t have any ability to veto. I imagine there are some cases in CA, thinking of that amusing article about an ice cream shop getting blocked by another ice cream shop.
It’s usually an indirect vote with your voice. To be frank, people don’t have that much of a role in what business gets built if it aligns with the states economic goals and zoning is not being critically changed.
I think the bigger discussion is if resources are going to be constrained can we make sure the use is being properly charged for resource buildout. It’s the same problem with building sports arenas or sweetheart tax deals for manufacturing plants, they often don’t pan out.
It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.
But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.
Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
> Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.
Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:
> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at
This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.
Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."
The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.
Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].
Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.
Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
Arguably, an 800 person town is likely quite far from most.
An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.
There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.
A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.
When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.
A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.
Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.
So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.
The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.
I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".
If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.
> you're liable to have holdouts
That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.
Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.
This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here.
I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.
The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.
Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:
* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick
* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials
* rising electricity bills
* rising water bills
> use too much ground water
Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.
The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.
Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.
Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.
So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.
The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.
If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.
> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY
Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.
It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.
The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."
It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.
The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:
- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles
We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.
I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?
Larry Fink is personally responsible for more insane progressive policies and pogroms in publicly traded companies than any other single individual. Historically, maybe Lenin was worse. Brendan Eich, father of JavaScript, was excommunicated from Mozilla for having private opinions not in line with the progressive ersatz religion. You’re not being serious here.
There is nothing grass roots about “AI will cause drought and famine” nonsense coming from the infotainment content mills. I don’t blame anyone for keeping their work out of the hostile press.
> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.
If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.
That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.
I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?
For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.
https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...
A $500m TIF district for a city that takes in $10m annually and holds <$100m in assets? I've seen some really dumb uses for TIFs before but this might just take the cake.
I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions.
The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in the future is very slim.
They primary concern is these centers will force water and energy expansions and those will be equally split.
Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had?
The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.
Power is metered.
If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of the ratepayers then it’s a pricing problem that needs fixing.
The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that capital investment needs to happen at once. You can’t even build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone.
Typically industrial consumers of electricity with predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that’s reflected in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility.
If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation capacity that’s a much larger failure further upstream by regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too for many years. It’s coming for us either way if we want to remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You can only maximize financialization for so long until you need to start actually making stuff again.
> Power is metered.
Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they incur on the system.
There is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed?
I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.
Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.
AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
Compared to the fair market cost of human labor? It might be thousands of times more efficient.
As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from them.
It’s no more useful than when google and stack overflow was at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered. Everything else gen AI is dystopian.
Why not debate me rather than downvotes? Eh hallucinations break my workflow and end up costing me more time debugging then it’s worth.
I'm not sure it's that linear
https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezue...
The most important news is in the subtitle -
> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.
Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.
Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around
You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
It’s to run LLMs.
In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
>Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money?
Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...
I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia.
My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.
I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
That only means they have to be built in counties which are part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return the water back to be net-neutral and comply with environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this article calls out is along a fresh water source and does not require Lake Michigan water.
The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.
> Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.
I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?
Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing.
Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.
Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.
> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.
Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
fun fact: insider trading in stocks is illegal, but insider trading in real estate is not.
So if someone is even considering buying a big block of land, anyone who knows about it can buy first in the area. That drives confidentiality agreements (which increase the value of being an insider).
Similarly, for large players to make large stock transactions, proceeding through the public markets led to traders seeing the bid/ask volume and act first, making it more costly. That lead to dark pools and off-exchange trading, which has become the majority (in dollar volume) since roughly 2024. So the "public" markets are now just tracking private ones.
Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.
Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.
There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.
Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?
Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community.
It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue.
It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.
because these entities have lots of money to pay people to convince local government that they should let them build their misery factories within their jurisdictions for "muh tax revenue" (that is paltry because corporate taxes end up being cut in the race to attract these vampires) and "muh jobs" (that usually dry up once the current thing in {industry} dies and the communities get left with the refuse. see also: the fracking and natural gas boom from ~20 years ago in the rust belt and the midwest).
Wisconsin runs mostly on coal power plants. It's a terrible place to build data centers.
My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.
Natural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisc...
[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...
I was about to ask where they plan on getting the extra power. They are anti solar and wind, so they will either need to burn coal or import it or both (or change the laws!)
It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait accompli for jobs. The interesting part will be the resource strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak load events?
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.
Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
Unlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus with several data halls this means that there’s work for those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you don’t have the steel and concrete work happening that went into the shell, but it’s more than a handful of operations people.
From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly well-automated to the extent that I’d see just a few people on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines or handling shipping and receiving.
You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.
If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.
If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.
I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
> use copious amounts of water.
If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.
On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.
Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.
I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for
Source?
Here's why I think this is wrong
"A typical (average) data center on-site water use (~9k gal/day) is roughly 1/14th of an average golf course’s irrigation (~130k gal/day).
On-site data center freshwater: ~50 million gal/day Golf course irrigation: ~2.08 billion gal/day"
On both local and global levels - golf uses significantly more water than data centres.
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for.
Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of a button?
This incident will be reported. /s
On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).
Ha, point taken. But the 'NIMBY' argument is interesting here because unlike a housing development (which uses local resources for local people), a data center extracts local resources (water/power) to export value globally. It's an extraction economy dynamic, just with electrons instead of ore.
Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.
Acres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and documents will use acres outside of legal documents.
India has has a substantial number of acre users.
Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.
This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.
No say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see.
Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people.
When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.
Kind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out of them.
Almost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.
I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering.
Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.
They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.
I'm not an expert but I know that new electric capacity takes a while and often a lot of investment (both in generation but also people forget all the other infrastructure necessary to get it to the right place, new transmission lines especially have been a problem) so both of those factors seem to have kept it high for at least some amount of time and also it's not even guaranteed they will since price increases seem to have been surprisingly sticky across a lot of stuff recently. Also, not to be too glib, but try the "prices will eventually go back down" argument on people who have to make the decision between paying for electricity or food this month and you'll see how well that argument goes over. Financial issues are pretty immediate to the large swaths of American living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In addition to environmental concerns (including power and water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details like this came out around Amazon warehouses. The fact is, the local communities don't reap the benefits from these despite having to shoulder the cost. Once built, they provide few, if any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new products or services are provided.
My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents.
Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)
In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
Yeah it’s wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When building a facility requiring large electric or water usage that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get connected with 10 or 20 year contracts.
It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.
> And solar is getting really cheap.
Alas...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/wind-s...
> Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company
How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?
These data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"
I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in.
I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?
I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.
How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?
One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.
Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.
There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.
So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.
This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.
I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.
its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had
So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI?
You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
I wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government disability payments which seems to be the main income source there.
I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.
I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:
> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.
I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?
Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".