Wooden Data Centers Benefits

I feel like we’re having a conversation about data centres while completely skipping the most interesting question: why are we building all of this computing capacity in the first place?

Everywhere I look, the discussion is about water consumption, electricity demand, emissions, land use, or how much money companies are making.

Those are important questions, but they’re questions about the cost of the buildout.

I’m curious about the other end of the equation.
What do we actually expect the world to look like when we’ve built tens of thousands of enormous data centres and have vastly more computing capacity than we do today?

What problem are we ultimately trying to solve?
Is the hope that AI and abundant computing will dramatically increase productivity? Accelerate scientific discovery? Automate huge portions of the economy? Create some kind of abundance that isn’t currently possible?
Or is this partly an arms race?

I’m not asking whether AI is good or evil, and I’m definitely not looking for “Skynet/Terminator” predictions.

I’m genuinely asking: What is the envisioned end state? What does humanity think all this computing power is going to accomplish? What will 200,000 data centres give us that 400 won’t? (Please be kind with numbers, I’m pulling them out of thin air)

It seems strange that we’re debating the enormous infrastructure required to build the future without spending nearly as much time talking about what future we’re actually trying to build.

Firstly, I work in IT so I'm no slouch in terms of understanding the tech, but what I'm struggling to understand is the scale of the data centres being built, and also the urgency in which they seem to be popping up.

The easy answer is simply for more compute, but I feel supply is outdoing demand, especially with the massive public pushback that is emerging. Which is leading me to think there is something more nefarious going on.

My conspiratorial friend believes an enormous amount of the population is going to be killed by one way or another and AI will exist to meet the needs of the 1% who will of course survive.

I'd be interested to hear any serious thoughts on this?

I kinda understand that they use a ton of electricity for power, and a stupidly large amount of water for cooling (i think?)

But that's it. I don't understand the way actual damage is inflicted on the environment and on peoples utility prices.

I ask this as my city recently okayed the development of a data center and I am anticipating my utilities to skyrocket in the years following it's completion. ugh... but no one else I am around seems to know or care about it.

Local services are mostly paid with property taxes. Data centers are very expensive properties, and therefore pay a lot of tax. Compared to other large scale industrial uses, it's very hard to find anything *less* disruptive to the local area for how much $$$ they bring in.

I don't think there's great data on data center taxes nationwide, but in this particular case study of Loudon County, VA they earn $1.3 billion in tax revenue from data centers. To fully offset all environmental harms created by the data centers would cost around $150 million. But people mostly don't do that because the environmental harms still aren't that great and there are better uses of $150 million.

Absolutely nothing. They bring money and spend it remotely, they don't benefit the local area at all.

They have enough money to lobby (read "bribe") local municipalities into allowing them.

I mean... if data centers didn't exist, you could not have asked this question here, so I guess you do.

Data Centers have been popping up all over the place in my town. Dozens over the past couple of years. Our local politicians seem to be fighting to bring more. However:

• Everyone's power bill has increased (need more substations and such, so they spread the cost around)
• Everyone's water bill has gone up (increased usage)
• They're ugly, and placed in what was mostly green/farm areas.
• There's constant construction everywhere around them.
• They're loud.
• They're basically industrial factories with hardly any employees being placed in mostly residential areas.

For the perceived positives:

• They're mostly automated, so they've brought almost no jobs to the area (I don't know anyone working there)
• Our property tax hasn't gone down at all, so if they're bringing in tax-revenue it isn't helping us at all.

Is there something I'm missing here? Why are they able to build so many of these things?

Online and in person you see lots of people complain about data centers. My understanding is that the benefits mostly stem from an increase in tax revenue and some new high paying jobs. Other the that the biggest downsides seem to stem from pollution and an increase in energy bills.

So, why should I want one built in my county/city?

The people in charge get kickbacks. 

Isn't that enough for you plebs? /s

None. The tech bros have all drunk the Kool-Aid on AI despite recording severe financial losses quarter after quarter in the hopes that it will all pay off someday.

You haven't met anyone that likes the internet?

Do you mean the data center specifically? Depending on the type of data center it can improve speed and reliability of internet services, but those would be relatively negligible.

They pay a ton in property taxes, even with the abatements offered by some cities and states.

They pay for extensive improvements to public infrastructure, including the power grid, water and sewer systems, roadways, and storm water management infrastructure.

The construction brings in thousands of jobs, often over a 7-10 year construction period. Those folks need places to live and eat and shop.

A single DC will employ around 50 full time employees, a campus with a couple building Will obviously multiply that number.

Reading through the rest of your points I think you fundamentally don’t understand how tax policy works, much less how land development works. I wouldn’t say you’re “missing something” more just misunderstanding something you are unfamiliar with and only reading headlines from other similarly misinformed people.

I think that datacenters can be problematic but the discussion about them is not nuanced and we are in a moral outrage because actual solutions are hard to discuss and keep the attention of compared to slop is slop! all of it is bad! datacenters are pollutive! see those are catchier and easier to follow

Don't forget the Electricians and Contractors. While it's less ongoing (maintenance), the construction phase earns local electricians, sometimes up to a hundred miles away, the equivalent of an entire year or two's salary. It's a huge undertaking and they pay extra for speed. The ongoing maintenance is not zero either, but it sometimes is not included in the jobs numbers because it's indirect through the electrical contractor.

Honestly, way more than people realize. Most of us use them every day without thinking about it - streaming, banking GPS cloud storage online shopping even hospital systems and emergency services rely on data centres. They’re kinda like the invisible infrastructure of the internet. You only notice them when something breaks 😭

Pretty much every convenience in our lives thats online

Data centers power the internet

The ability to not have to remember anything whilst simultaneously being constantly misinformed.

There are viral posts claiming that water sources are polluted by data centers and the like. How much of this are true and what are the additional environmental impacts of these data centers?

This is wrong, and of course it's the top comment. It really boils down to the tax incentives. Most see a large increase in tax assessments, which lower the percent of property taxes for everyone else in that particular taxing authority.

Again, it really depends on the tax incentives given, but there are some benefits to areas having them.

Some data centre owners make guarantees about utility prices not increasing for local residents and things like that.

I’m just curious. Haven’t met anyone, to this day, that thinks they are a good idea considering what is compromised at their expense.

The age of AI has arrived. This is not really arguable. There are proven results in variety of fields: bio research, data processing, defense/security. (And yes consumer entertainment).

Any country that does not build data centers will fall behind and will probably have to build data centers later to catch up anyway.

So fighting against data centers is delaying inevitable at best and quixotic tilting at windmills at worst.

So why do I want my view changed? People on Users and beyond seem to celebrate politicians who block or delay data centers and companies who build them are villified for building them. So I want to be sure I am not missing something since the passion seems to be real.

What is unlikely to change my view:

1. Data centers take up too much energy. The solution is to build more energy production (like nuclear) that we will likely need in the future anyway.
2. Data centers take up too much land. USA in particular has plenty of land. Housing shortages are mostly artificial and mostly due to ridiculous single home only zoning that seems to be eating up 70+% of every metro area. That's what we should fix. Blaming data centers is silly.
3. AI is a bubble. Two things can be true at once. AI can be incredibly useful and be the future and be a bubble. Dot Com was a bubble in 1999-2000 but that does not mean that dot com tech did not ultimately win out. Pets.com was the ultimate bubble case study that was heavily over valued... But 20 years later chewy.com exists and is a major retail player with larger valuation than pets ever had even at the bubble peak. Same thing will likely happen to Ai, modern companies will get overvalued and some may go bust, but in 15-20 years the tech will mature and become pervasive.

Thanks every one! Looking forward to the discussion.

Full disclosure: I recognize and am glad people are getting angry at billionaire CEOs, but as somebody who works in the data center industry it seems the majority of criticisms of datacenters fall flat. There are valid ones, but they could be solved by simple regulation. There isn't much you can say about a datacenter that you cant say about the manufacturing industry.

Common criticisms of data centers are:

1. Water use. This is reasonable concern depending on the climate, but this isn't inherent to datacenters. There are closed loop systems, and other cooling methods. This is where regulations should step in about water use.
2. Power usage. Again reasonable but this isn't unique to datacenters. Industrial use as a whole uses about 25% of America's electricity and despite all the growth. Whereas datacenters just consume about 4% of Americas power. America as a whole needs to invest heavily in clean renewable energy, and if datacenters and other industrial uses are forced to build out their own renewable energy, that will further help create economies of scale for renewables in the United States.
3. It doesn't create many jobs. This is an excellent reason to oppose subsidies, but not a good reason to oppose datacenters outright since this standard isn't applied to other industries. For example, around three quarters of factories employ less than 20 people, and over 90% employ fewer than 100 .People are generally supportive of increasing manufacturing in the United States, but it is similarly resource-intensive and it doesn't take many more people to watch over a bunch of robots than a bunch of servers. Not to mention, from what I can tell most estimates for the amount of jobs data centers create only count ones physically located inside them and not the total. There are many middle class, often WFH jobs from network engineers to cloud architects created that never need to visit them. To me it's very odd that there is always a talk about increasing manufacturing in the United States but a push against datacenters, when the impacts of each industry is quite similar.
4. This one is less common but I have heard people complain that it doesn't employ locals/ skilled professionals are brought in from other areas. I never understood this conclusion, since it's an odd conclusion to assume otherwise. Businesses generally recruit nationally unless they are in a major city with an established labor pool in their specific industry. If an industry doesn't exist in a place already, of course they're going to bring in experienced professionals. Hell, a big part of the reason that companies hire recruiters and have people at university career fairs is to get talent that wasn't looking at jobs in their specific area.