But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
"The selection of tier-2 metropolitan areas shows that overall, they are growing faster than market average. Madrid and Milan are clearly taking the lead and are both able to attract the biggest additional investments. It can safely be said that they are on their way to becoming additional tier-1 locations."
https://www.eudca.org/documents/content/ZlZXb4bRSRefaEVqya2I... (downloads a pdf)
> Trust in me
No, because being Italian doesn't mean you know anything about this. Most Italians think the primary Italian exports are mozzarella and tomatoes.
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
Sometimes you will need to do stuff even if energy is not cheap. Come on (I’m italian too)
Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?
We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.
I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.
If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")
And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.
People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.
My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 [3] https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679
Just because “progress has a cost” doesn’t mean I have to support whatever the owner class decides is progress. They are explicitly telling us their plan for AI: to take our jobs. This isn’t speculation - the CEOs are literally saying this openly, and we should listen.
Sam Altman can’t just throw around the words “cure cancer” occasionally and expect us to not see what he’s doing. The unemployment issue? He used to say we would solve it with UBI, and recently said he no longer believes that will work, without providing an alternative. I guess we’re just on our own while he destroys our livelihoods now?
The future the hyperscalers want involves insane energy and water use. What do we gain out of this exchange? Right now it’s fun that Claude Code does our job for us, but if they pull off their plan we’re a few years away from massive concentration of power, mass unemployment, AI assisted warfare, unprecedented misinformation campaigns, etc.
I don’t think I’m crazy for questioning whether this is worth it.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
The Luddites were also guilty of violent acts and they were afraid to threaten or use violence to protect their interests. It wasn't a simple disagreement of evil capitalists versus saintly laborers. They cared more about protectionism for their personal businesses.
They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history. We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.
You: They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history.We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.
HN sophistry of the highest level. It's shit like this that made the sophists deeply hated back in the days (today too, i would add)
Ironic that you’re waxing philosophically about the quality of comments on HN while doing all of this.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
* fantastic technology [citation needed]
* economic suicide [citation needed]
You can also take a look at North Korea as an example of a nation that decided the industrial revolution was one to sit out.
It's neat, for sure. But not exactly the steam machine.
The more our definition of "Luddite" becomes historically accurage, the more it is true that yes, the HN audience is composed of people like that.
Ah yeah, the people of HN, well known for burning down datacenters.
The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.
Remember the ones defining who’s a terrorist are pedophiles.
what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers
Anyone who wants to opt out can do so and it'll play out just fine for them.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
Tech companies clearly want to coast on the infrastructure built out by the government. Microsoft doesn't really want to pay 10 billion euro to upgrade the Dutch power supply.
What happens is that they will go to countries that let them pollute- a tale as old as the industrial revolution.
But it's not AI related, it's true every time the eich and powerful privatize benefits while making the costs and risks to society.
It's a more global and important problem.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
I wonder if all they want from the future is fat people on mobility scooters like the beginning of wall-e.
Sure, AI may be the future for a certain market, but datacenters aside we will always need clean land, air and water, food for our bodies and homes to live in.
Except you know, the history of SV, NY and the US in general, which has been treated more like an economic zone for the world's intellectual and financial elite, rather than the home of a specific group of ethnic people indigenous to that area with a sense of inheritance and belonging whose roots spawn hundreds/thousands of years, like in other places on the planet that don't produce tech scale-ups.
In other words, engineers, scientists, tech people and the entrepreneurs and financiers that enable this ecosystem, migrate to the place that offers them the best capital, opportunities and levers of exploitation that enable capital extraction at scale, but they don't have any roots to tie them that place they moved to, come hell or high water. The moment the capital or top jobs are drying up or the taxes hike up, then they pack their bags and leave, and move on to the next best place for resource extraction.
That's what he meant.
I think you are discounting the speed at which solar is accelerating in southern Europe. Power is already pretty much free during the daytime on the Spanish and Italian grids, and grid-scale battery installations are starting to come online to spread that curve wider.
read the article:
> Lombardy alone accounted for 63% of the applications submitted throughout Italy.
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
> If the Milan hinterland is the most 'targeted' area, an increase in interest is also registered in the other provinces: in the rest of Lombardy there are three already active, plus one under construction and five under evaluation.
Or if we're above wet bulb climate conditions again, we just watch the newest algorithm invent stories for us built on the uncredited labor of real artists.
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
I believe it has more to do with preserving the landscape that attracts so many tourists.
Solar farms in Italy faced resistance for the same reason.
It's not green politics.
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
In your examples, that'd be by increasing deterrence. Just like these taxes do.
You only get to have an opinion on data centers because politicians in Italy aren't directly impacted and have no skin in the game(no threats, international pressure, lobbying and bribes aimed their way). But if they did, I assure you your opinion wouldn't be taken into consideration on this matter and would be ignored.
Forget nukes, but like if Italians would like a referendum similar to Brexit, on stopping all illegal boat migration coming at them every year, then that opinion wouldn't be given a thought. You DO get a vote on data centers because politicians don't care and it's an easy populist win for them as another commenter here said.
You know what else is populism? Robbing the youth of money and giving it to the retirees as an unsustainable pay as you go pension system they will never get to see. Just because you call something populist to discredit it as being bad, doesn't mean it's not gonna happen.
What does that even mean?
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.