How about the middle ground of ok, you can build the datacenter, but it's owned by the locality. They can lease it back to the builder for the privilege of being able to operate on their ground. And the lease is steep. No more second homes on the cape, or private italian schools for the kids.
No despicable data center apologist has ever suggested that communities shouldn't negotiate the best deal they can get to compensate for the incurred costs and externalities.
Why do you feel justified defining what terms a community can agree to when considering hosting a data center? Do you not believe the democratic right for them to self-govern.
the 5-7 people they employ during normal operation. High skilled engineers get flown in for setup and major changes/operations.
They add little local economic value.
I've seen multiple stories already talking about how these installations are almost universally net-negative for the locales they're built in.
Maybe if someone is in Congress, they can skirt the law around lobbyist gifts due to your position of power, but 1. it doesn't sound very plausible that someone becomes a multimillionaire by squirreling away illegal gifts or campaign funds and 2. to become I doubt small town city councils making these decisions are in a similar place. Most of reality is boring and not like the movies.
In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Anger towards DCs are pertinent from a politics-in-rich-country angle, but it has no relevance on the overall trajectory of where we are heading.
If DCs get banned in the US, there are still many middle income countries who want them in their special industrial zones, due to the FDI and employment opportunities they bring, and these countries provide generous tax breaks to hyper scalers to compete for their business.
Malaysia and India are recent examples of this policymaking. The new US funded DC zone in Philippines is another example.
There's an interesting geopolitics (emphases on "geo") angle to this if these critical assets are going to increasingly be built overseas.