Data Centers

I hope this ai bubble bursts soon and these co's lose millions.

Spent $600 at microcenter the other week on 64gb of ram. Not even fancy high speed stuff, low/mid end 6400MT/s ddr5 crucial. A year ago this was ~$300 and change.

The same thing is going on here in Iowa with plenty of nimby complaints as well. In addition to the points you made, our state and local governments are handing out tax incentives to bring them here. So they will be using up valuable local resources raising the cost of utilities and services for everyone while not paying their fair share of taxes for many years to come.

The industrial activity represented by data center construction in the USA is absolutely huge.

If you are interested in looking at a web site that says it shows maps of current projects by state you can start here:

https://cleanview.co/data-centers

I can't answer for the accuracy, but it probably beats asking people posting here what they have noticed in their local area.

I live in New Mexico, and this site's map for NM shows very few projects, but among those some seriously huge ones. Some of those have been in the local paper, so there is that for accuracy.

Yes, they're using your tax dollars to subsidize "Big Data" whose end goal is to take your job!
Mark

The closest one to me is outside of Vineland, NJ - about 15 miles away. Has been under construction for a few years now and I was really wondering what they were building on the site. They began by building a huge, concrete wall surrounding the property, about 16 feet high - literally running a mile or more. For awhile I thought it might be prison (of course, there was no signage). It's developed by some foreign company but has been leased exclusively to Microsoft.

Here's an interesting report from the Delaware River Basin Commission about data centers in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware

https://www.nj.gov/drbc/library/documents/WMAC/101525/Thomps...

want a Costco built in my town, but not a data center.

It's amazing how everything is spun into whatever narrative anybody wants. Like there are pluses to having a data center in your town. Or, a warehouse distribution center.

So many things today are all about profit and no regard to anything else. For example, there is a company buying up ice rinks nationwide, and they are for profit funded by private equity.

One example in Michigan is they evicted a club that has been in the rink 50 years. Another rink the cost of a house league went to $2,400 (where I live in house is $600). They claim to be acting in the interests of kids!!!!

So, imho one should stand up for anything they feel is not right.

Here's another link for data centers:

https://www.datacentermap.com/

This is pure speculation on my part but I work with a lot stuff like/related to the field.

I think they are placing these in rural areas so they can tap into preexisting infrastructure. Somewhere like rural PA likely has tons of transmission lines that can be used for the power and a very dense fiber optic network (even if the fiber is not avible to the consumer they care about it at the node level). These kind of things would not be available in the desert somewhere. Planting one in the middle of no were NM or the like mean you are looking at 1000's of mile of high tension lines and fiber not a 100 miles. They are doing it to mooch and local policy makers see it easy win. The problem is these places don't have employees, it might make a few jobs but a couple Wendy's would employ more folks......

They require a huge amount of water to cool them even if they are saying they are a closed loop. They also require a ton of power which will stretch the already weak power grid. Nothing good can come from this stuff.

we located data centers for maximizing availability with diverse sources: we'd try to choose a borderline between power sources, comm lines (sometimes our own) and not in-line with airport runways. An example of diversity was the requirement that the comm lines enter on different sides of the building due to our aversion to backhoes. Looks like "diversity" really has become a bad word. Now data center locations seem to be based on where people can be bullied.

It has gotten harder and harder to build things of all types in the USA as the breadth of obstacles endlessly grows. (so many people and institutions can say no, or at least pose serious delay and cost increase). The president of TSMC, which has built endlessly on Taiwan, was shocked at the difficulties they found building new fabs in the Phoenix area (which already has lots of fabs). As he put it, you need a permit to do anything.

That and gaining access to adequate power constitute big enough obstacles that some serious people are working quite hard on preparing to put new data centers in orbit.

I agree, I don't think any of this is good.I think a lot of it is just hype. I heard somewhere almost 60% of these centers have been canceled or paused. 98% of this is investor hype.