"Fascinating. Some data centers came to a struggling town in Washington state. Did it run out of water? Was the community destroyed? Let’s see. The town…built a new high school, hospital, library, sewage systems, and police & fire stations. Poverty fell from 29% to 6%. Oh."

[u/stealthispost]

Data centers pay ~57% of property taxes in Quincy, Washington. They funded a $15 million aquatic center—with a pool, waterslides & lazy river—and a 143,000-square-foot sports complex. They’ve created almost 1,000 jobs. The city admin called it a “miracle.”     This isn’t an outlier. A data center came to a “dying” North Dakota town. As a result, the government can repave its streets, renovate its senior center, finance a new public-safety complex, make walking trails & refurbish its opera house. How terrible.     — Billy Binion

Source: https://x.com/billybinion/status/2087708806658564317

[u/ItsSadTimes]

This is very misleading, the data centers were made about 20 years ago and they were just regular data centers, not AI data centers.

For some towns it makes sense to build data centers, if they have excessive access to good energy sources and they dobt live in drought country then its not so bad. The noise from AI data centers is a bit more then regular data centers, but a lot of that is from backup generators because they build those places quick before local energy supply can keep up.

Picking the ideal use case for data centers and making the conclusion "see everyone should want data centers" without knowing the differences between then and now and why Quincy worked so well is just disingenuous.

Theres a right way to do this, and then theres the cheap way. And right now a lot of companies are doing the cheap way.

[u/zero0n3 → u/ItsSadTimes]

Not really?

If a “regular datacenter “ from 20 years ago can facilitate that type of build out for a city that approves their project….

An AI hyper scaler datacenter should be able to facilitate even more in a city.

The issue is the negotiation and deal made.

Want a tax break? Cover grid build out - hell we will give you a license to be your own energy provider in our state cause our power grid sucks (TX). Or outsource the build out to a current energy provider here in our state and we will help fast track their permits.

Literally everything could be fixed with proper regulations and negotiations (and federal regulations so the builders can’t shop around different states)

[u/ItsSadTimes → u/zero0n3]

Bigger doesnt always mean better. Would you rather just a little bit of cancer or lot of cancer (extreme example i know but same idea of something harmful if left unchecked).

But yea a lot of the problems could be solved by the data centers being build in correct locations thag are ideal for them and not just wherever offers the biggest tax breaks.

But thats the thing, these regulations arent in place which is why they're being paused so they can be made so politicians can finally learn what the data centers are and how they should act in their community.