How to stop a data center in your backyard

dorksquad

most people have no idea where their apps come from. they think it all happens on their phone. this is why we can't have nice things.

ofjcihen

Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”. At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.

arjie

There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park. I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel. 0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines

cucumber3732842

The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.

tptacek

Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.

_--__--__

I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).

bluepeter

Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.