Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal (opens in new tab)

> local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents

Or they're paid to not think about it. I don't consider Occam's razor when politicians are involved

None of that is new whatsoever. AWS has been doing that for 15 years at this point. The cloud didn't start existing just because of AI.

A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).

A small number of jobs for security guards.

Maybe a tiny number (one to three?) for individuals tasked with actual hardware swapping within the data center itself.

And all of the above assumes the data center owner does not "travel in" the requisite individuals on an "as needed" basis -- in which case the only jobs that may go to the locals is "security guard".

But all of the "sys-admin" management level work can be done remotely.

So the actual number of new jobs that arrive in the locality is likely on the order of 20-30 or fewer.

In a town of 12K people I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Most of if not all the labor to build it will be flown in, most of the labor to staff it will be moved in.

And once it's built it's not like a Walmart or something where you need enough staff to police the crowds...there are not crowds. There's some rack and stack needs, and some ongoing cabling needs generally,and some other stuff, but they are staffed as lightly as humanly possible.

I suppose w/ all the out of town labor to build it there will be more waitress and hotel cleaning jobs for a while...a town or over...where they can actually house the labor.

Oh, and they are getting an Olive Garden...which will probably employ more local labor.

It will raise $8-$18m/yr in property tax revenue for the county (depending on abatements), which will likely increase the local counties revenues by 30-50% and primarily go towards local schools, as well as an estimated 50-150 jobs.

If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.

The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.

> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents?

If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology.

[1] https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/ctec_datacenterrp...

Almost none. Its entire value is in one-time construction regional purchasing and the ability to say the word “jobs” to the cameras. Occasionally they have the guts to charge market rates for resources or taxes but for the most part that’s heavily discounted. (See also e.g. The Dalles’ attempt to secretly sell much of its watershed to datacenters.)

Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort.

Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.

As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development

It’d be a lot easier to argue that a railroad yard is a necessary part of a datacenter, and then eminent domain and pave it :)

But there’s some sensible planning in linking datacenters and railroads, honestly. Truck-shipping 44U fully-loaded cargo racks in standardized quarter-containers would a lot more sense in today’s AI-proliferation context. And I’d be up for seeing datacenters lose their natural lock-in resistance to customer migrations; “a competitor offered us a 5% discount plus freight refunds if we shift at least 5 cars of racks to them” is a lot easier when your datacenter has cargo crane capacity. There’s still a place for bespoke DCs but for the cog-in-the-cloud stuff that we have now, it’s not a bad idea!

(And, if you add a third rail for power-over-Ethernet, then you can start to have datacenter migrations that don’t cause an outage. Amtrak is already implementing the first stages of datacenter-grade connectivity for riders on their trains, though not amperes of the necessary degree yet.)

A railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability.

Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc.

Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.

Snowpiercer but with data centers? The breeze would help with cooling!

A LOT of fiber rides alongside railroad tracks. Easier to string and maintain.

And why is that?

> it doesn't generate any real tax revenue

This is a choice the local government can make. You can read Loudon County's (us-east-1 + everything else) explaining what it does with the data center revenue it gets https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County.

> it increases electricity costs for the region

Also a choice the local government can make! I don't know about this specific case but I suspect we'll see local governments get more sophisticated when negotiating with tech companies.

> and it increases electricity costs for the region

This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.

Data centers are high-dollar projects that sound great and officials are able to look like they're doing things to increase revenues, generate jobs, create infrastructure and put the community on the forefront of high-tech. Altogether, those are commendable increases, but the devil is in the details, in that all of those things do not occur at once and the costs associated with have a much longer payoff timeline.

Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)

Municipalities, at least in some states, can be sued for refusing development that meets existing regulation and zoning

A few steak dinners go a long way.

I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.

Property tax and (in some cases) utility taxes are deeply attractive, especially in places with large industrial-zoned swaths of land nobody is really interested in.

Homeowner property tax would be 37% higher in Loudon County if not for all the datacenters. DCs are a great subsidy for the county coffers.

> I'm pro-progress

I think everyone is, by definition.

It's the second thing

> increases electricity costs for the region

This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.

But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.

If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.

There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.

It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.

The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.

Like, what did “the elderly” ever do for us? Aside from literally creating the civilization around us, and the infrastructure necessary to support it? Seems perfectly reasonable to expect reward for that, rather than pollution and increased energy costs.

> It will be interesting to see what we do with these enormous concrete boxes once we find a better way to do whatever we think all this 'ai' is going to do.

These are just prefab tip-up walls with metal roofs, bar joists, columns spaced 30-40 feet OC, and a 6” concrete slab.

It’s no different than an Amazon distribution center once all the electrical substations, switchgear, generators, and UPSes are gone.

Red states are against the deals as well. Many people in Texas are fighting back but sometimes it’s too late because the deal was done in secret.

That data center is in the Memphis suburbs, 5 miles from the airport, in the third largest city in the state. Wouldn't call it rural

This is 100% not a political issue, red & blue are lining up against DCs. the DC capital of the world is Northern Virginia which is bluer than Bernie

NIMBYism comes in all colors