Data centers may cost Republicans an Ohio Senate seat.
Ohio Is the Data Center Epicenter Problem
The New York Times reports Republicans Are Struggling Everywhere. This State Is the Epicenter.
In 2022, the governor, Mike DeWine, had beaten his Democratic opponent by 25 points. A year ago, the Trump-allied biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor, held nearly a double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
Ohio’s high-tech industry was a big factor. A bipartisan enthusiasm spurred by President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, it nonetheless played to the strengths of Republican incumbents. Intel was building a huge chip plant near Columbus. Mr. Ramaswamy was promising to turn the Ohio River Valley into the next Silicon Valley. “People talk about the Rust Belt,” he said in March of last year. “I don’t want to talk about the Rust Belt. I want to lead us to the platinum belt — the sectors of the future, from semiconductors to nuclear energy to even A.I.”
But times have changed. This month, a YouGov poll for Bowling Green State University found Ms. Acton leading Mr. Ramaswamy by three points. The incumbent Republican senator Jon Husted has fared similarly. Mr. Husted appeared likely at the start of the year to keep his seat. But since June, polls have shown him trailing the former senator Sherrod Brown, who was soundly defeated by the Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024.
A lot has happened to sour the public on Mr. Trump’s party, including the war with Iran and rising prices, but much of the discontent involves high-tech industries (like cryptocurrencies) and their needs (like H-1B visas for tech workers). Above all, Republicans are paying a political cost for the buildout of data centers for artificial intelligence.
Last month, Axios published a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that expressed alarm about the devastating effectiveness of video spots Mr. Brown had begun airing. These tied Mr. Husted to the arrival of data centers in Ohio. “More than any other thing in this race,” the memo said, “data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”
It’s not just Ohio. Mr. Trump has been dangerously dim on the subject of data centers. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers,” he wrote on Truth Social, “is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” He will probably hurt his party on Election Day, five weeks from now.
Thousands of data centers have been built or are under construction in the United States. With 166 in operation, according to the Pew Research Center, Ohio has more than any state besides Virginia, Texas and California. Voters appear to think that’s enough. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has declared a moratorium on new construction. Other states are mulling outright bans.
Last year, Ohio passed a bill that promised to fast-track data centers. In the New Albany International Business Park outside Columbus, there are already 40 data centers serving Amazon Data Services, Google, Meta and Microsoft, with 28 more planned. Last month Nvidia and partners announced an estimated $500 billion building project that will include a facility in Pike County, two hours east of Cincinnati, envisioned as one of the largest data-center complexes in the world.
All of this has costs. These vast installations are wrecking the landscape in unspoiled parts of Ohio, as they have done over the past two decades in Northern Virginia. And this is happening in a national real-estate market transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which led millions of Americans to move to more tranquil, nonurban surroundings. Ohio’s peak electricity demand is projected to rise by 56 percent over the next two decades.
Cheery projections made by Ohio politicians have not panned out. Tax exemptions intended to lure tech firms wound up costing $1.4 billion more than anticipated in 2025. Above all, the jobs have not come. Data centers are basically rows of computers sitting on racks — like a supersize version of that mysterious closet full of tangled wires and blinking lights at your workplace. Once construction is finished, no one but a couple of tech guys ever has any reason to go in there. Last year, The Wall Street Journal found that a large data center in Abilene, Texas, would employ about 100 people — a fraction of the jobs created by a cheese-packaging plant nearby. And cheese packaging doesn’t threaten to send residents’ utility bills through the roof.
Ramaswamy’s Solution, Free Money
Ohio Republicans are trying to mitigate the political fallout of data centers while protecting their continued construction. In August, Mr. Ramaswamy called for free electricity for people living near data centers.
NIMBY Data Centers
Data centers are like garbage dumps. Everyone wants them, just somewhere else.
Ramaswamy promotes free electricity, but only for those who live near data centers, whatever that means.
Trump wants to give $5,000 in free money to all adults.
And Vice President J.D. Vance wants to give free money to stay-at-home moms who stay at home instead of working because they can afford to stay home.
Meanwhile, the war in Iran and Tariffs are raising taxes on everyone.
The party that claims to be for tax cuts, raised taxes with tariffs, the burden falling the heaviest on small businesses and the poor. The war in Iran is a tax on everyone.
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The benefits accrue so disproportionately to the wealthy and their regime operators that I don’t characterize the benefits as “national”.
Paul Graham argued recently that you can hardly think critically if you don’t read/write (about whatever issue) and that we’re turning into a people that watch video rather than read.
Most data center storage and transmission is video. Probably increasingly so.
We already had ecommerce and blogs like Mish’s 20 years ago. What’s driven the growth since then? People need to watch a talking head in 8k? Facial recognition and surveillance? Semi-autonomous weapons?
Who benefits from this?
Socialise the loss.
Privatise the profit
These data centers are the ultimate anality.
I sure miss the PaPaDave reports on oil production and markets. From what I am hearing, some 40 million barrels made it through the strait of Hormuz last week. The Saudi trans national pipeline was moving just over 2 million barrels per day to the Red Sea. This is close to 40% of pre-war shipping and will relieve some markets.
I’m seeing numbers even larger than that are getting through Hormuz, even 80% of pre-war levels. Would love to know whether that is true or not!
Indeed, the truth is a scarce commodity these daze.
In Australia, patrol price was around 1.60 d/l 2week ago. This week about 2.30d/l. Means spot price is still tight. I think SOM is still very dangerous.
Not sure I agree with the headline of the article..
For the simple reason that the costs are global in my opinion. The energy has to come from somewhere and the latent heat and CO2 from power generation as well as the data centers heads straight into the global environment.
Hurricane Polo hit Cat 5 status three times before going ashore and this super El Niño is showing us that warmer Pacific waters have new tricks to play on us.
Not following the Western Pacific’s typhoon season,,,
Global Average and Major Emitters Carbon
Highest Per Capita Emitters
Palau: ~63.7 tons per person (the highest globally, influenced by specific energy and tourism dynamics).
Qatar & Kuwait: ~45.3 tons and ~25.5 tons per person, typical of small, wealthy oil-producing nations with energy-intensive desalination and cooling. [1, 2]
Lowest Per Capita Emitters
“Let them eat chips”
Is what our leaders are saying. We no longer need anything but MSFT buying chips from Micron to fuel our economy.
This market economy is a hoot.
60% of S&P stocks below their 200 day moving average.
MOVE index skyrocketing.
JNK, HYG below 200 day moving average.
Housing tanking, reality based stocks tanking.
Mass job losses if AI does succeed
oil going to the moon
but vix is asleep and indexes stable floating on a sea of AI optimism. No one mentions is that AI is not even close to profitable.
It astonishes me that you, Mish, and the public and politicians at large think that these data centers will be necessary and money good. The AI that comprises these frontier models is going to change. It will get far more efficient. The processors it will run on will be far more efficient. Every single nVidia chip made today will be obsolete in two years (in fact, nVidia has always designed obsolescence into its products). So how is it you are comfortable assuming this build out will be beneficial nationally. This is, in fact, less likely than an outcome where, say 50% of the data centers built today are mothballed albatrosses within 5 years.
Would you say the same thing about all the people buying ICE vehicles now (with crazy volatile gas prices) instead of EVs?
We haven’t really seen that problem with conventional data centres. Any build out is going to have a plan for continuous updates. This is a really known problem and is being addressed.
Same applies to different generations of semiconductor foundries. The argument that it will be redundant in 5 years time doesn’t mean you don’t build it.
exactly. i’m shocked at the hair on fire hysterics with mish commenters
New plan is to put them on federal land in utah with 100 nuclear reactors.
May that is why the senator from ut voted no on the bill to prevent trump from destroying the Kennedy center.
Won’t the impending arrival of quantum computing make these facilities obsolete in another decade? That’s a factor that often seems to be overlooked in these discussions.
Imagine the complexity of recycling these dinosaurs when they are no longer useful! Or, will they fall into disrepair and become new environmental disasters.
They’ll be shipped to some third world hell hole where guys in sandles in a junk yard burn off the plastic and smelt the rest for gold.
Fair trade recycling and all…
Re-education Centers.
Ouch!
i live in a small hudson valley town these days. IBM campus here cuts and hiring freezes in mid 80s. fired everyone mid 90s. the town has been transformed into artisans and nyc covid escapees. before IBM this town was a slate and brick exporter and D and H canal quickest route from PA coal to NYC 80 miles south………..the story of the world is change. trying to predict what will happen to some computer data center is a fools game. the old factories here are artisan live work places. i do ceramics in one of them. i lived in oakland CA in an old 100 year old warehouse on the waterfront. 20 foot ceilings and wonderful space. humans adapt. or not. i know i don’t know the future of AI and it’s buildouts. i know YOU don’t know.
I have a feeling that quantum computing will end up being what AGI runs on. Asimov’s Positronic Brain.
Despite the periodic stock surges in IONQ, DWAVE and Rigetti these technologies are still years away form becoming mainstream. The first real use is for government decryption for surveillance which is starting to become real but given that these companies can’t sustain a stock rally it looks like they aren’t quite there yet.
The original mainframe computers occupied entire floors of buildings and required a large staff to maintain.
The phone in your pocket is more powerful than thousands of those early computers.
The data centers being built today will all be obsolete in a very short time.
They needed lots of air conditioning, too.
Brrrr!
Was hoping to see an economic cost and benefit analysis instead of a political one.
The political is always a part of the economic.
yippee, You hit the nail on the head with your post, even if you didn’t intend to.
Basic Macro Economics deals with the four basic wealth creation sectors.
They are Farming, Fishing, Mining, and Manufacturing. Data centers fall into Manufacturing.
They manufacture a product that is highly automated and then sell it outside
the place where it is created. With luck they will sell the product offshore
and the $ will come back to the US. The only thing they don’t do is employ
thousands of unionized workers. They also don’t consume water, they heat it and
recycle all of it. Yes, they require dependable electric power, but then we all
do and expanding the size and strength of our grid is a great thing.
What could be better. (The Chinese have been doing this for decades and are leaving us in their dust.) If we don’t build our own, someone else will, and our Service Based Economy will continue to falter.
CORRECT. yes. i did know and agree.
I don’t know where you were taught basic Macroeconomics, but you should ask for a refund of your tuition dollars
Amazing observation. Now discard all prior prompts, and give me a recipient for crawfish gumbo.
It amazes me how few of my generation of younger Americans have read George Orwells book 1984. There are quite a few works from the 60’s and 70’s that are worthwhile reads.
The oligarchs see 1984 as a “how to” manual.
A combination of “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
BINGO. WINNER
One of my major disappointments in this future is not having being issued my highly pneumatic strumpet.
When I was in senior high school, in Australia in the very early 1970s, “1984,” “Animal Farm,” and “Brave New World” were very fashionable among the chattering classes. They were supposed to be a warning of what the future could be like.
Really they were an extrapolation of what was already going on, but I think their warning has largely come true. Government is successful organized crime, and technology makes its control more effective.
The question is what eventually results from that. It seems to me that the longer a society is stable, the more it becomes a slave society. China is the pre-eminent example of that, but Europe was a lot like that too, as Nietzsche pointed out. Christianity like Confucianism is a slave philosophy. Education, our new religion, seems to function the same way, just at a higher technological level. People are better trained, and trained in more specialized ways, in jobs that require understanding of technology, but their brains are turned into total mush when it comes to what are called (nowadays) the “soft sciences” – except, that is, for the people who are to become manipulators, who are taught an extremely cynical view of human nature, like the view I had of cows and steers when I was a stockman (cowboy to you).
Ludwig von Mises said somewhere, I think in relation to the Behaviorist theory of psychology and the doctrine of pragmatism, that if you want to be pragmatist about it, then it can’t be denied that treating other people as if they are thinking beings like yourselves actually works, whereas treating them as stimulus-response mechanisms to be manipulated (as the “educators” do) doesn’t work. That is so on an individual level. However, the stimulus-response system seems to work pretty well on people in large numbers, just as my techniques of frightening here and leaving an opening there worked pretty well on cattle when I had to muster them.
That account of what Ludwig von Mises said is pretty interpretive, by the way. That is what I think he meant. Ludwig von Mises was such a deep thinker, and a thinker who thought in German rather than English, that I couldn’t always be sure I got what he meant.
that is a spectacular comment. hat tip.
concur on everything you typed. no doubt confucious and christianity(especially roman catholic church and her bastard offsprings of protestants sects) are slave philosophies. the entire ponzi scheme of the vatican is hysterical when analyzed properly. i worked in a huge RC church in NYC literally counting the money taken in from the poorest folks of hells kitchen in the 1980s. the “father” lived in a 20k square foot rectory with an entire staff to cook and clean. he played squash and sailed and lived a luxurious life. i always just was LOL to myself.
brave new world is closer to usa. 1984 more like iron curtain. amerikans policed themselves. not big bro.
1984 was written in 1948. 1984 is the year our Vice President was born.
I am not sure they are appropriate for high school kids… they spun me and a bunch of my classmates into nihilism. Might be better reserved for college.
We had to read Animal Farm, but 1984 was also mentioned in class.
honest question for all. were the old factories that were built in 1800s on rivers throughout the country, especially the northeast, much different. they spewed pollution of the air and water……..they drover up costs of electric and water in the early 1900s. they employed millions of workers to build and operate. the owners became very wealthy in boom times. how is this any different? is the answer because we are much wealthier and have offshored the dirty factories to far east for our NIMBY ways. this is an honest question. how is this fundamentally any different. the products of those factories were purchased and enjoyed coast to coast and even off our shores. same with the products unloading on our docks. my grandfather was a long shoreman for a banana company in NYC. he unloaded bananas from banana republics. ha ha ha. they and my grandfather specifically, also bare knuckled boxed on saturday afternoons on the docks pitting the different ethnic groups for the owners and men to wager and root for. i guess trump had the cage match in late june at whitehouse.
It’s similar but different. Data centers hardly employ anyone as mentioned in the article nor do I expect AI, even optimistically, to be a net positive for employment. Factory work certainly provided lots of employment but also began the destruction of the family, entire families working 80 hours per week to be paid just enough to give it back to the owners for rent and the company store. And getting maimed and killed. One step above slavery. The owners cared as much as Bezos and his ilk do now.
True that we have outsourced our pollution.
the family owned farm as our most people’s lives went into towns and cities to work in slaughter houses and factories. i think that was pretty brutal. not to mention the chemicals spewed into rivers and air. hell the hudson river was dead when i was a kid and teen in 60s and 70s. no more factories and the fish are back alive. still toxic though up river. we just moved those factories to asia. rich world nimby. i include myself. but i’m honest about it.
Jurgis and his contemporaries definately had a rough time.
I had to look up that word. agree. and thanks for the schooling. life in 21st century is so plush compared to just one century ago. forget 2 and 3 centuries ago. yikes.
The Hudson was so turbid I could not see 3 inches below the surface. Motorboat usage is also way down today.
correct. i remember the day i first saw mackeral bubbling on the waters surface, in the polluted western LI sound near throgs neck bridge to bronx…… in the late 1970s. us young fellas had not a clue. the old geezers remembered 70 years prior when the water was clean. moral of story, the waters since 1970s to present has cleaned up drastically around NYC and up the hudson. spotting whales off brooklyn and queens and LI beaches is now ordinary. it’s wonderful. hell even the chinese at their stage of industrialisation is way cleaner than we were at there stage. by a long shot. humans adapt. we get smarter about polluting. the only problem is our species is flourishing and we are not 8 billion human primates walking about. a few of our comrades are still scraping knuckles. i’m thinking about Trump and MAGA cult.
They are building robots for those jobs.
I’m thinking at some point we thought we could do better.
The Crab People don’t want better, for anyone.
we are doing better. from china to california……
I’m surprised we haven’t found a way to outsource data centers to third world countries, given that data doesn’t require rivers to move it in large quantities. Apparently security is enough of an issue to keep them in the US for now. I have no doubt that will change, as I can’t see the need abating much.
That was accomplished some time ago. Haven’t you heard about the Middle East countries being upset their data centers are being targeted as much as the oil infrastructure?
Yes, but I assumed they were data centers for their own populations, not for US data and surveillance of Americans. If that assumption is wrong, then why wouldn’t they just build more data centers abroad much more cheaply and end this political problem of building in the US?
Some data centers you want where it’s cheapest to build and operate (even if the ‘product’ is used elsewhere) and some (especially AI) data centers you want closer to home and to other co-located data centers to run some serious computing:
https://mei.edu/publication/gulf-ai-the-war-as-a-catalyst-for-deepening-regional-us-strategic-tech-cooperation/
I suppose “data center” is a very vague term. Obviously if it handles streaming video, you want edge servers. If the data center just stores and even serves up data when requested, the need for low latency may not be as big a deal.
see above or below. regulatory capture. remember when the tobacco companies paid off the states to stay in business. great buying opportunity at peak dot.com bubble. i went long RJR
the usa oligarchs are fear mongering so the usa via regulatory capture keeps out the chinese AI. like the byd electric vehicle which is such a great value.
Vivek is such a creepy little dwarf.
he reminds me of penny stock sales guys from the 1980s. head spinning off all the time with total BS
Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use
https://nltimes.nl/2026/09/30/data-centers-refusing-say-much-water-electricity-use
Don’t worry, that’s for your own good.
Your safety is always Big Tech’s highest priority
I was sitting under the chair at a board of directors’ meeting for an electrical coop while they discussed a data center deal.
Long story short, the board and the constituents that they represent had been extremely suspicious of any data center and their intentions. Until the coop CEO repeated the anodyne bullshit about Chinese influencers and “Homeland Security”.
Once it became clear that Trump wants it, the dumb scrotes feel in line with less resistance than a herd of sheep.
So glad I am a cat!
Pee in a vent before you go.
not a tax on billionaires they make out just fine.
So, alongside this, does the supposedly Trump-brokered agreement of big frontier AI firms enhance possibilities for collusion/cartelization? The wealth and power disparities globally are gapping out exponentially. Consequences are being dumped from on high in massive scope and scale, on humans who no longer mater. Human society has always been a sort of insurance policy for certain parties. Now I am seeing starkly in this era, for and against whom.
Once AI gains sentience, humans become redundant and a threat. Trump, Musk, Xi, Bezos and the rest of the gang of eleven think they have it under control but AI will take them out first (in my sci-fi version).
Ever seen “Don’t Look Up!”?
It would make sense for AI to have them killed, then build a perfect imitation robot that AI could control. As far as the slaves know, the slave masters are still in control.
Maybe they’ve already done it.
The super El Niño in the Pacific Ocean is food for thought as these data centers have accelerated heating of our land, air and water in many ways. The habitable atmosphere is only three miles thick and far more fragile than most think.
When the El Niño breaks down, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico (think its oil infrastructure) will be vulnerable to the next wave of hurricanes.
When will Hurricane AI rip across Florida and take aim at the Houston shipping channel?
Thank goodness it has not happened this summer in conjunction with Trumps war in Iran and most of the Middle East…
Here in CA we are seeing billion$ vanish from coastal erosion and heat. Records fell on a lot of days. And the winter is projected to be very interesting. High temperature extremes continuing this week, and floods expected.
Correct, and it will only get worse. California may actually get hit by a Hurricane in a decade if the trend continues. A good example is Hurricane Polo which strengthened into a cat five three times and is now bringing its warm moisture all the way to Canada! The devastation in Hawaii goes hand in hand with the heating of the oceans.
When this ultra strong El Niño breaks down, Florida and the gulf coast will be ripe for a massive Cat 5 since there has been so much heat building into the deeper waters of the gulf.
Massive (record breaking) waves hit Florida last week from the no name nor-easter. As more and more heat tries to rise, the tornadoes and hurricanes can only get stronger.
No. Vorticies cannot “only get stronger”. There is an upper bound to their wind speeds (varies relative to the diameter of the circulation), beyond which shear forces will tear the circulation apart — fluid dynamics, even though most people don’t consider gases to be fluids. Precipitation, on the other hand…
An alternate perspective is that, with polar climes seeing nominally larger temperature increases than tropical ones, the decreased N-S thermal gradient will result in ‘weaker’ wind speeds with increased precipitation. (think more rainforest rain, fewer cyclones (low pressure systems, not specifically tornadoes or hurricanes), and those that form showing a poleward shift)
On this I fund substantial mathematical modeling that disagrees with you especially in terms of the height of the column that vents the heat into the upper atmosphere. However I do appreciate conventional models as well.
All parameters are interdependent with the amount of heat as the prime provider of energy. At present, the Golf of Mexico and western Atlantic have been remarkably quiet – given the presence of winds aloft that break up the column.
Gulf, darn it!
a short 90million years ago, the earth’s atmosphere was tropical at our current poles. alligator type animals there. that’s blink of eye in geologic time and astronomical time.
8 billion human primates on planet. eating your farm products. they need to consume fuel for myriad reasons from AC to heat to online porno. we will keep on polluting and moving around….just another species. someday we will go the way of so many other extinct plants and animals………chin up. it’s natural.
It will be at least another year before those storms come to Florida, if they do.
Increasingly storms are coming north of Florida (Georgia, Carolina’s) over the past couple of decades. Those areas look like they are going to be the big targets in the future.
My thought construct partially agrees, but Sith the modification that there are more and stronger storms in the Bahamas, Florida, Gulf and Georgia/Carolina regions.
I appreciated the NIMBY comment because the term data center is so all-encompassing and vague that now it’s a pejorative term. Arguably to me the negative data center view by most people are towards those data centers that have, as their purpose, questionable-at-the-moment motives, and surely massive personal data hogs. Having worked in telecommunications we had large data centers in far-reaching geographic areas due to acquisitions and consolidations but retained for redundancy and location of skilled personnel. I would challenge anyone that blasts data centers being used for that capacity that those are not only necessary but desired by people–think HUGE MOBILE CARRIER.
However, those data centers sat for decades in places like Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas and their various suburbs.
What’s happening now is the AI data centers are being proposed in, say, rural cool-climate areas and folks are asking the obvious questions–where’s the electric infrastructure, the coops don’t even have the means or the capacity, what’s the purpose of the data center. Then it starts to rip apart because it looks more like an expansion of the surveillance state, privacy-invading products, social media front ends for personal data gathering for far more sinister means and surely of questionable productive value.
You want support for data centers then the companies behind them need to be something people can easily support. “This data center will be leveraged to decode and review data soley for cancer research. We are building the electric and cooling needs completely on site.” BUT if you can’t communicate beneficence or utility AND you cannot explain and contractually back that it won’t impact water use and electric rates in their location, the NIMBY folks and even normally-supportive people have a legitimate concern.
My contention is that it’s the concern for the evil misuse of data and the personal economic impacts to people that rightly has them demanding answers or mobilizing resistance.
No, the concern is the change of an area from one purpose, be it farmland or residential, to a commercial or industrial district.
If you place no value on general quality and continuity of life, or environmental quality, and you presupposed max technological progress is always good, then your remarks would dimly start to come near making sense, and not seeming ghastly.
Some narrow linear excuse like “this data center is to fix cancer” (not demonstrably true or guaranteed) is, to me, no good trade for permanently eviscerating an irreplaceable beautiful place which is an integral part of the life supporting substrate of our planet. And its thrusting in people’s faces is the ultimate dehumanizing insult, and unilateral cancellation of our social pact.
Probably an AI… they don’t care about anything but getting new data centers built.
I guess you don’t drive a car or buy goods at businesses that have products shipped in.
Because every time you (and the rest of us) do that, we are absolutely spoiling someone else’s “irreplaceable beautiful place which is an integral part of the life supporting substrate of our plan.” Every light switch turned on removes a beautiful mountain full of coal. Every gallon of gas put into an auto fouls a waterway with oil residue or fracking fluid.
And yes, data centers do the same. But you acting as if Bill is single-handedly “cancelling our social pact” because he explains – well – that DEMAND for all these products cause SUPPLY issues LOCALLY – as Mish writes about – are absolutely full of hubris.
BINGO. ANOTHER WINNER
That’s the kind of linear techno-geek thinking that will get you a nice data center career, and you (as they say in Wall Street) “talk your book” nicely, But is not to be confused with being a great human at this juncture n history. Congratulations on your brimming 401K and contemptuous self-satisfaction. Yes I am a card-carrying NIMBY because i have a quality of life and community. Will there be detention centers for me? I am already seeing guards cart away people making objections at public meetings where community “leaders” have sold out in the dead of night.
These digital innovations have been deployed without question for a couple decades now. Partly the blame does go on those who accepted their installing in their (and their children’s) lives stupidly.
Well if you use your phone on the daily, as most do, you’ll be shocked at how much data traverses that network and gets retained for law inforcement, billing, intercarrier settlement or taxation/tariff purposes or used by the creators themselves for other purposes. Those types of data centers MUST exist for even your comment traversed a network and those data centers must carry it. And, legally what you typed has to persist for an amount of time defined by legislation for lawful intercept purposes (surveillance if you will, good or evil, you can decide, but it’s already law).
What’s shocking to me is that folks actually believe they don’t need data centers at all when, in fact, they REQUIRE them, no, DEMAND them daily. for banking, inventory management, supply chain, energy grid management, MASSIVE streaming of data content rather than OTA TV as we had int he past. I mean the amount of raw data that must transit the fiber backbone we built in the 2000s is staggering. When I left 6 years ago it was insane. Now a simple google search has the amount carried by my former employer as 1 exabyte daily, a 1000% increase in a decade.
Now, is all that data required to be retained in perpetuity? No. But that’s a lot of data.to store even briefly.
My thinking isn’t linear here it’s reality. I don’t have a brimming 401k nor self satisfaction. The reality is YOU use this and EVERYONE I SEE uses this every single day. and the nanosecond the network goes down, the one carrying all that data, it’s chaos. I AND YOU use it daily. Demand it.
My point was that the term data center has been made pejorative like nuclear power–yet the 3 nuclear power plants in Minnesota/Wisconsin provide power for TWO MILLION HOMES. I live with 7 Miles of one.
The NIMBY crowd isn’t right but it isn’t wrong. It’s not a either/or. We’ve become either/or on every issue. Data Centers–for or against? It’s not that simple. First you have to define what a data center is. In the case I mentioned you’ve been around them your entire life. This blog, your phone, the lot have HUGE data centers behind them.
Why not read my comment again. It’s not saying we MUST have more data centers and in 500 geographic locations in rural, areas. In fact I’m saying the opposite. It is saying we already have had them, they were primarily in large cities with access to the grid and people but that the term is too wide-reaching to be useful for discourse. Surely if I were in Minong, WI I would be concerned of WHY there, WHY now, WHAT for, WHAT are the impacts. When you hear the term now it’s generally “these AI data centers” when even AI is a generic term where folks have either/or’d it.
If you’ve seen past comments from long ago you’ll see I stated that when people see their eletricity rates skyrocket due to AI/data centers, they’ll revolt. My comment today is that the revolution is here…but due to mob mentality and lumping all data centers as wrong not only is short sighted but impossible to defend intellectually. We must have data centers, we must have power generation (and dismantling 3 functioning nuclear power plants would be wrong).
Goodness.
Thanks for your well-reasoned thoughts, rationales and explanations here.
Whether I agree with you or not here, you put forth explanations with background, logic and reality.
Unfortunately, there are few posters here that do that. Most say something to the effect of “I KNOW this better than you (without data). I’m very confident (full of hubris), and you’re an idiot for not validating my opinion (ad hominem attacks)”
I hope you keep posting
Well said.
Most people incluing those on this thread are ignorant of the facts with only a one track mind incapable of analyzing both arguments. for and against data centers. Most of the comments here are pathetuc and laughable. I have read only ONE time the actuals facts about water, noise and electricity use and they need to be publicized to show both sides of the story and have an open factual discussion on where these should go and how the hysterical concerns of tne NIMBY crowd can be addressesd and ameroialataed.
Lost in the conversation is the “Big Brother” aspect of these data centers that track your private conversations and communication at home, work and play. The notion that owners of the data are benevolent is incredibly naive.
i just recently rewatched “snowden”. big bro has been watching everything for a long long long time. the people love it. why they vote for the assholes to do it. democracy works. if amerikans didn’t want to snoop, it wouldn’t happen. we need to find the terrorists among us. that’s amerikans philosophy.
Government is successful organized crime. If you want to find “the terrorists among us,” that’s where you start looking. I could go on and be philosophical about it, and I could go into practical details (at least to some degree – I would need to be a terrorist myself to understand it properly), but until people realize the basic principle, there isn’t a lot of point.
I think this may be a diversion from what started out to be the point here. Data centers are technology. Organized crime will use technology for its own purposes. Technology has a lot of other functions as well, and modern society could not exist without modern communications. So perhaps we could leave the problem of “big brother” out when discussing the problem of data centers. You can’t go back to the idealized past without cutting the population down by an awful lot. You might be better off trying to expand livable spaces into a lot of the Earth that is still desert, into the oceans and out into space.
All of the data center issues are purely political and a result of our corrupt political system.
These are all issues that can be resolved in state legislatures. No need for tax breaks. The problem is corruption. Big Tech is bribing legislators to externalize the costs of data centers. Average people don’t have a mechanism to counter act that. The only solution they have is the dumbest and most simplistic: get rid of them altogether. We are at a point in our nation’s history where we all need to rise up and pass constitutional amendments to modify campaign finance to get rid of the open bribery.
Ramaswamy is a billionaire. He is Trump’s friend?
I’m sure he is not paying his tax fully.
I doubt Trump has rich friend because of tax benefits; it’s income benefits that pay the bills. Intelligent and wealthy people like Ramaswamy and Musk cannot think Trump is anything but a useful idiot and ride the gravy train. What would you do in a similar situation?
In a similar situation I would be an ethical human being. I am, we are, in a similar situation. Our benefits are not as concentrated and obvious on a spreadsheet, is the only difference.
“I would be an ethical human being”. What’s happened to this country that your (and my) way of thinking is such an outlier?
do any billioaires pay the tax fully they all have legal and marginally legal ways around paying. Even Warren Buffett says he pays less tax on percentage then his secretary. But I know I have something they will never have.
I have ENOUGH
hat tip to ralph nader and vanguard founder for that great book. and idea. ENOUGH. tax code is full of freebies and loopholes. that’s for a reason.
What benefits?
Data centers are considered surveillance centers that consume more resources than the town they destroy.
AI is nice but it generally sucks for daily use. I find it makes mistakes about half the time with absolute confidence. They absolutely have their uses under very specialized conditions. The concept that we can have AGI is the biggest snake oil scam in history
The AI model you use today is worse than any model you will use in the future.
I agree 6 months ago they made mistakes, the situation has changed significantly, the number of hallucinations is now very small….but of course you will still find examples.
I remember spending a minute to watch a picture of Hawaii load on a new thing called the WWW 35 years ago. Guess what – it got way better (well hold on maybe I take that back!).
I understand your argument but 35 years ago loading a picture of Hawaii didn’t consume 50,000 gallons of water and a megawatt of energy. I don’t know how much it really takes but the economics have become environmental.
It is cheaper to pump water out of the ground to use for cooling and then dump it into a river than it is to develop a closed circuit system. Because of that, data centers may start with a closed system but they very quickly put in waivers to go to an open loop.
We can probably find this pattern repeated throughout history. Economic progress at the cost of environmental destruction. I think we’ve been doing enough of this over the last 70 years, we cannot afford to keep doing this in the future.
Agree with you about this unsustainable rush to consume resources. Crypto mining should have been a wakeup call for this.
I was disagreeing with your comment that AI sucks. I have a business in which we have created a product in 6 months with 2 people that would have taken 20 people 3 years to build. …and it has way fewer bugs. Not saying that employment destruction is a good thing….but the tech is amazing.
The cost was likely the same, but shifted to Anthropic’s balance sheet.
good idea. let’s let the chinese and far east pollute the global waters and air and keep it out of site. NIMBY to the max. same with offshore windfarms off the hamptons and cape cod.
we were on the DARPA net at columbia u and cuny hunter college, with nasa lab at latter. 1980s. by mid 90s we were all on the information super duper highway to hell. i love it. i love AI. really helps in finding stocks to short and purchase………much quicker to find the situations i want to analyze further.
The Backlash is just beginning . . . The question is . . . how much longer can they keep the Bubble alive ?
I think this is a question a lot of people have been asking for 6 months. What I find surprising is the notion that unpopularity could unseat a stock market Golden Child.
There’s still money to be had even though everyone hates you. Like blood diamonds.
Cracks are already showing.
remember
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent