They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.

Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.

The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.

The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.

When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.

The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying

This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.

When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.

A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.

I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.

* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.

This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.

If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.

That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.

Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.

It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.

The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."

- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles

We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.

Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason) but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy them as a means to cut out the voters.

Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had?

The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.

Bitcoin—>Altcoin—>NFTs—>StableCoin—>AI—>They'll just invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on.

It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.

In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.

Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.

My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".

Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.

Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.

Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.

> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?

It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue.

It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.