Comment by dguest

Comment by dguest 2 days ago

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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".

upboundspiral 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.

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  • scoofy 2 days ago

    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.

    https://www.strongtowns.org/

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    • pseudohadamard 2 days ago

      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.

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      • antonvs 2 days ago

        A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking.

        It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronger emphasis on public transport, bicycles, walking etc. is automatically resisted. The conspiracy theory fits this bias perfectly.

        It's not so much that they have "opposition to livable cities," it's that they have different beliefs about what's livable.

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  • OGEnthusiast 2 days ago

    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).

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  • kjkjadksj 2 days ago

    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.

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    • michaelt 2 days ago

      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.

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      • ben_w a day ago

        I know why I, personally, consider eco-friendly power to be ideal; but why would the builder of a DC care?

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    • ahi 2 days ago

      Considering the capital costs in fitting out these datacenters, the land being 10x more expensive doesn't move the needle much on total cost.

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    • expedition32 2 days ago

      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...

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      • wat10000 2 days ago

        Yep, Northern Virginia gets you close to the BosWash megalopolis and pretty close to better than half of the US population. It also gives you access to a highly educated workforce and pretty much no natural disasters of note.

        There's also network (pun intended) effects. Northern Virginia has been a major internet hub for a long time, with the first non-government peering point and a bunch of telecom companies, including AOL.

        The data center land isn't that expensive anyway. Northern Virginia can be tremendously expensive, but the data centers are built out in the relative sticks. I'm sure the land would be cheaper in Wyoming, but it's cheap enough.

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        • pseudohadamard 2 days ago

          I was thinking of a slightly different incentiviser, you're right next to the county's largest collection of bought-and-paid-for politicians, if you need the rules bent a little, or a lot, you can point to your data centre off in the distance and remind them what you're paying them for.

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  • rvba 2 days ago

    They dont have any negotiating power -> it is a race to the bottom

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  • jadbox 2 days ago

    Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.

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  • expedition32 2 days ago

    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.

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eigencoder 2 days ago

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.

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  • horsawlarway 2 days ago

    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.

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    • [removed] 2 days ago
      [deleted]
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    • lotsofpulp 2 days ago

      > I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies,

      See the popular vote results of Nov 2024 US presidential election. Reputations were on full display.

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      • nativeit 2 days ago

        Doesn’t that further defeat the argument for secrecy here?

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        • lotsofpulp a day ago

          The argument was that people's collective judgment, given transparency, will result in good decisions.

          But we see from the Nov 2024 elections (and others, but most glaringly that one), that that is, sadly, not true.

          So the people rejecting Facebook because of Facebook's reputation tells you nothing about whether Facebook is bad, because the people could have just as easily been bad.

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      • antonvs 2 days ago

        > Reputations were on full display.

        The problem is that many people liked what they saw. Reputation was still important, but there were different beliefs about what reputations were desirable.

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  • grayhatter 2 days ago

    > 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.

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  • b00ty4breakfast 2 days ago

    it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

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    • buttercraft 2 days ago

      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.

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      • mbreese 2 days ago

        Cities can largely do what they want. They can deny applications for whatever reason they want. Citizen concerns are very important here (they need to keep voters happy to keep their jobs). But their main mandate is to protect the public good. If a project isn’t in the interest of their community, they ca deny it.

        Whether or not it’s legal is another question. And NIMBY and… and… there are lots of potential concerns. But this article is about Wisconsin, where the question is really what are we going to do with this land and how are going to power it.

        Your post mentions a lawsuit near you. This is a feature, not a bug. Even if the city is unlawfully denying an application, the denial still has the desired effect — a de facto denial for the length of time it takes to resolve in the courts. By dragging out the time for a lawsuit to be resolved, the city hopes that the developer will just go away and find someplace else.

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      • dylan604 2 days ago

        > They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone

        They absolutely can and do this. Ask to put an adult entertainment store next to a school/church. Ask to put a liquor store next to a school/church. The city will say no.

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  • josefresco 2 days ago

    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.

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    • eigencoder 2 days ago

      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.

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  • wat10000 2 days ago

    I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.

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    • macintux 2 days ago

      > Now keep in mind that a man's just as good as his word

      > It takes twice as long to build bridges you've burnt

      > And there's hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal

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      • lagniappe 2 days ago

        They say trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback

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    • bell-cot 2 days ago

      "Doing that would fail to align with the company's current priorities. And by the way - you're fired." -Catbert

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a2128 2 days ago

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

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  • infecto 2 days ago

    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.

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    • state_less 2 days ago

      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.

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      • jeffbee 2 days ago

        > the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center

        This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

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      • SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago

        I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.

        It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.

        It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.

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      • infecto 2 days ago

        You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.

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    • cmxch 2 days ago

      What kind of say do the residents have when it’s nearly a done deal?

      Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto, they’re just speaking into the void as far as the company is concerned.

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      • infecto 2 days ago

        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.

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  • datsci_est_2015 2 days ago

    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.

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    • mistrial9 2 days ago

      the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too

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      • datsci_est_2015 2 days ago

        Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior…

        Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.

        Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?

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  • tzs 2 days ago

    > 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.

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Supermancho 2 days ago

> 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.

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  • JKCalhoun 2 days ago

    Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?

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    • Supermancho 2 days ago

      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.

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      • sneak 2 days ago

        How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?

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  • mistrial9 2 days ago

    Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic abuse in siting movies and TV

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miki123211 2 days ago

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.

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  • dguest 2 days ago

    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

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    • keybored 2 days ago

      "Tragedy of the commons" is suffering from people overusing it.

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  • e40 2 days ago

    The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

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    • slfnflctd 2 days ago

      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.

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      • sylos 2 days ago

        so datacenters should be allowed to come into communities, consume their resources and barely hire the local populace?

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  • fc417fc802 2 days ago

    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.

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  • duped 2 days ago

    > Everybody wants X to exist

    Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.

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infecto 2 days ago

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.

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  • GorbachevyChase 2 days ago

    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.

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analog31 2 days ago

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.

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vasco 2 days ago

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.

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kevin_thibedeau 2 days ago

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.

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  • dguest 2 days ago

    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.

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    • kevin_thibedeau 2 days ago

      > you're liable to have holdouts

      That's what happened after his shell companies were exposed.

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  • tokai 2 days ago

    But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.

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tptacek 2 days ago

Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.

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buellerbueller 2 days ago

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

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AndrewKemendo 2 days ago

> "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.

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packetlost 2 days ago

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.

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Exoristos 2 days ago

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.

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emsign 2 days ago

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

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  • jandrewrogers 2 days ago

    > 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?

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    • Throaway1982 2 days ago

      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.

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      • triceratops 2 days ago

        Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.

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    • gosub100 2 days ago

      "Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.

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      • coredog64 2 days ago

        Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.

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    • bargove 2 days ago

      Tell that to the poor people in Mexico, where hundreds of new data centers are sucking the local aquifers dry... (hurting the people directly)

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    • emsign 2 days ago

      I'd rather have something to eat or take a shower at home than talk to an LLM.

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    • zoeysmithe 2 days ago

      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.

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  • zug_zug 2 days ago

    Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

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    • phil21 2 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
mkarrmann 2 days ago

Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid.

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

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  • topaz0 2 days ago

    In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.

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    • dguest 3 hours ago

      The only way this makes sense for communities is as a kind of "finder's fee", i.e. you might argue that if BigTechOne™ knew that they'd have to bid against BigTechTwo™ they'd never even bother to scope out the location.

      Still, if the prospecting is the bottleneck there could be 3rd parties (or even the tech companies themselves) entering into agreements with towns which allow both a finders fee and open bidding for the lot.

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duped 2 days ago

> 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."

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  • wat10000 2 days ago

    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.

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    • duped 2 days ago

      My rate has been consistently 40-60% higher over the last year independent of weather

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      • wat10000 2 days ago

        Your rate, or your bill? I'm seeing people complain about their bills. None of them ever come back and discuss how much of the change was due to changes in their rate versus changes in their usage.

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  • bluedino 2 days ago

    They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media.

    Ironic.

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GorbachevyChase 2 days ago

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.

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  • convolvatron 2 days ago

    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?

    Reply View 1 reply
    • GorbachevyChase 2 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies