9 ms·

For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Like data centers, factories use a lo

by lbarrow 5mo ago

For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs. If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.

burnished 5mo ago
Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.
km3r 5mo ago
Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
- swarnie 5mo ago
  Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
  - bloppe 5mo ago
    It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect. These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
  - butvacuum 5mo ago
    Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
    - fc417fc802 5mo ago
      That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar. Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
      - butvacuum 5mo ago
        did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith. Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
        fc417fc802 5mo ago
        The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context. The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions. Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
  - donmcronald 5mo ago
    > I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. What's the math on that? It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
    - hermanzegerman 5mo ago
      It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
    - butvacuum 5mo ago
      For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
  - MattSteelblade 5mo ago
    A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
    - butvacuum 5mo ago
      Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it. The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
- butvacuum 5mo ago
  Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid. What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
  - mmmm2 5mo ago
    And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
    - bluGill 5mo ago
      There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
- Bratmon 5mo ago
  Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
  - carefulfungi 5mo ago
    Of course Mainers aren't monolithic... https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legislators-vote-to-legalize-plug-in-solar https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla.... https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/solar-distributed-generation https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
    - Bratmon 5mo ago
      Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses. And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
      - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
        This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank. Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies. I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
    > Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
    - 5mo ago
- bornfreddy 5mo ago
  Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
- culi 5mo ago
  The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027 And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it. https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-failed-25-years-and-most-should-be-phased-out-research-0 https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
  - ainch 5mo ago
    Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
    - irishcoffee 5mo ago
      Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
      - ainch 5mo ago
        Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
        irishcoffee 5mo ago
        I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
        ainch 5mo ago
        Oh sure, I see what you mean - thanks for clarifying. On top of your point, it's true that CO2 has a prolonged impact on global temperature even after it's been 'removed' from the atmosphere, so even once solar pays back the original carbon investment its impact lingers for a while. I guess at a certain point you're getting at a more fundamental question about the value of AI (plus technology and everything else) - what level of environmental tradeoff is acceptable? One thing I slightly lament about the discourse is that tradeoff is widely discussed in the case of AI, but not in the context of stuff we do. I suspect most people aren't aware that the water use associated with eating a burger dwarves a year of ChatGPT, that a long-haul flight wipes out the emissions savings of a couple years' veganism, or that renewables have their own impacts, like the demolition of Chile for copper.
- cmiles74 5mo ago
  You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target. I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
  - antisthenes 5mo ago
    Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts. Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
    - vkou 5mo ago
      If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
- einpoklum 5mo ago
  Why? Because: 1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used. 2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
  - km3r 5mo ago
    It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs. That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  > Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
- josefritzishere 5mo ago
  I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?
  - bryan_w 5mo ago
    Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways. If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing
dakolli 5mo ago
Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.
dclowd9901 5mo ago
For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?
- cloudfudge 5mo ago
  In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.
  - xphos 5mo ago
    The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations. I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
    - cloudfudge 5mo ago
      > The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.
      - fc417fc802 5mo ago
        Being against a ban is equivalent to requiring that something be allowed. It might or might not end up happening, but either way it is permitted.
        cloudfudge 5mo ago
slabity 5mo ago
> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs. The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees. The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.
- j2kun 5mo ago
  My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human. Ignore them at your peril.
    - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
      Vibes can be safely ignored when they are disproven by easily accessible facts
      - joquarky 5mo ago
        Facts are ultimately just vibes that pass a cultural filter.
- unicornporn 5mo ago
  Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
- beastman82 5mo ago
  I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
  - gmm1990 5mo ago
embedding-shape 5mo ago
> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why. Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions. To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?
threetonesun 5mo ago
I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing. The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?
shaky-carrousel 5mo ago
Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.
- inglor_cz 5mo ago
  Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people. OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy. Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed. I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.
  - pixl97 5mo ago
    >who already use or (say by 2030) Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then. >do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed. Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety. You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.
yfw 5mo ago
If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant. Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them
nutjob2 5mo ago
It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of power and provide very few permanent jobs. I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?
Forgeties79 5mo ago
I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashes/#:~:text=In%20August%2C%20a%20dump%20truck,fatal%20crash%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said. https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...
AvAn12 5mo ago
If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely. In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop. Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?
- Legend2440 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- raincole 5mo ago
  > new competition for water Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.
- TheTaytay 5mo ago
  This whole conversation is happening due to data centers existing…
BrenBarn 5mo ago
I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook). On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
- pesus 5mo ago
  > On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely? I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in the coming years in one form or another.
fr4nkr 5mo ago
The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power. Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.
- efromvt 5mo ago
  I wonder why this doesn’t get us frustrated with the grid, not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.
  - TheTaytay 5mo ago
    I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self fulfilling prophecy: don’t build new power plants. Don’t build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can’t keep up…it’s defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different lens.
    - trueno 5mo ago
      I mean one has to also consider the current political _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy needs. And given the current outlook and environments even states are now operating in with federal overreach shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in this reality: - most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment - literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it. so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.
seattle_spring 5mo ago
If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.
gensym 5mo ago
No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's. The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love. The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos. (To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)
ZeWaka 5mo ago
One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.
culi 5mo ago
It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles
physhster 5mo ago
[flagged]
themafia 5mo ago
> For people who support this kind of ban I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that. > would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Has anyone actually done that? Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?
cma 5mo ago
When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state. They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong. A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.
bparsons 5mo ago
Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good. Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.
zdrummond 5mo ago
I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.
LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.
kube-system 5mo ago
I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry. A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.
myhf 5mo ago
Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to move. All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.
sQL_inject 5mo ago
It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions. The rest will fallow.
throwaway27448 5mo ago
It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.
rvz 5mo ago
AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did. Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements. Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-center-energy-forecast-bitcoin-mining https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.
xphos 5mo ago
Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources. Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it? Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers. I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
- tjohns 5mo ago
  > Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it? You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about. > Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers. Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
  - fc417fc802 5mo ago
    > an excise tax on number of servers We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes. More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
    - xphos 5mo ago
      I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term
nkrisc 5mo ago
It depends what the factory is producing.
neophobia 5mo ago
As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.
SamDc73 5mo ago
yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.
- kube-system 5mo ago
  It isn't necessary to evenly distribute industry across the entire country out of pettiness. Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.
  - SamDc73 5mo ago
    I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms are tied to certain external factors in a way things like data centers aren’t. but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’ so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.
    - kube-system 5mo ago
      The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is not the same in all locations. There are differences in land use, environmental requirements, power generation methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.
carefree-bob 5mo ago
People are worried about their power and water costs rising. I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom. I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario. But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.
pesus 5mo ago
Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?
stego-tech 5mo ago
This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”. The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout. As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands. So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
- freedomben 5mo ago
  > This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”. The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
jmyeet 5mo ago
So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are: - 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside; - Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people. Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year. So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people. Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize. My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs. Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".
romaniv 5mo ago
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.
dreambuffer 5mo ago
It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.
Nevermark 5mo ago
> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Car parts factory? With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center? I did not know those existed. But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes". A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy! https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813 (For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)
8note 5mo ago
there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not. whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations? data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations
MisterTea 5mo ago
> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Those factories employ people. > Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.
harimau777 5mo ago
Several reasons: AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories. AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists. Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them. If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.
hammock 5mo ago
Historically the factories in Maine were mills, which use water for power. Those days are long gone but in a different time you would find no resistance to more factories in Maine, it’s a wasteland now
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
factories aren't as automated as data centers (at least not yet) and still contribute more to the local economy than data centers
QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago
They expect the coming crop of data centers will be used to hurt them, and don’t want them built anywhere?

by lbarrow 5mo ago

burnished 5mo ago

Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.

km3r 5mo ago

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

swarnie 5mo ago
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
- bloppe 5mo ago
  It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect. These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
- butvacuum 5mo ago
  Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
  - fc417fc802 5mo ago
    That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar. Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
    - butvacuum 5mo ago
      did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith. Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
      - fc417fc802 5mo ago
        The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context. The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions. Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
- donmcronald 5mo ago
  > I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county. What's the math on that? It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
  - hermanzegerman 5mo ago
    It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
  - butvacuum 5mo ago
    For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
- MattSteelblade 5mo ago
  A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
  - butvacuum 5mo ago
    Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it. The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
idle_zealot 5mo ago
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
butvacuum 5mo ago
Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid. What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
bluGill 5mo ago
That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
- mmmm2 5mo ago
  And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
Bratmon 5mo ago
Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
- carefulfungi 5mo ago
  Of course Mainers aren't monolithic... https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legislators-vote-to-legalize-plug-in-solar https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla.... https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/solar-distributed-generation https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
  - Bratmon 5mo ago
    Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses. And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
    - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
      This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank. Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies. I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  > Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore. I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
  - 5mo ago
bornfreddy 5mo ago
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
culi 5mo ago
The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027 And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it. https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-failed-25-years-and-most-should-be-phased-out-research-0 https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
- ainch 5mo ago
  Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
  - irishcoffee 5mo ago
    Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
    - ainch 5mo ago
      Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
      - irishcoffee 5mo ago
        I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
        ainch 5mo ago
        Oh sure, I see what you mean - thanks for clarifying. On top of your point, it's true that CO2 has a prolonged impact on global temperature even after it's been 'removed' from the atmosphere, so even once solar pays back the original carbon investment its impact lingers for a while. I guess at a certain point you're getting at a more fundamental question about the value of AI (plus technology and everything else) - what level of environmental tradeoff is acceptable? One thing I slightly lament about the discourse is that tradeoff is widely discussed in the case of AI, but not in the context of stuff we do. I suspect most people aren't aware that the water use associated with eating a burger dwarves a year of ChatGPT, that a long-haul flight wipes out the emissions savings of a couple years' veganism, or that renewables have their own impacts, like the demolition of Chile for copper.
cmiles74 5mo ago
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target. I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
- antisthenes 5mo ago
  Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts. Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
einpoklum 5mo ago
Why? Because: 1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used. 2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
- km3r 5mo ago
  It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs. That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.
throwaway27448 5mo ago
> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage. That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
josefritzishere 5mo ago
I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
harimau777 5mo ago
Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?
- bryan_w 5mo ago
  Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways. If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing

dakolli 5mo ago

Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.

dclowd9901 5mo ago

For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?

cloudfudge 5mo ago
In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.
- xphos 5mo ago
  The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations. I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
  - cloudfudge 5mo ago
    > The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.
    - fc417fc802 5mo ago
      Being against a ban is equivalent to requiring that something be allowed. It might or might not end up happening, but either way it is permitted.
      - cloudfudge 5mo ago

slabity 5mo ago

> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs. The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees. The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.

j2kun 5mo ago
My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human. Ignore them at your peril.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    Vibes can be safely ignored when they are disproven by easily accessible facts
    - joquarky 5mo ago
      Facts are ultimately just vibes that pass a cultural filter.
unicornporn 5mo ago
Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
beastman82 5mo ago
I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
- gmm1990 5mo ago

embedding-shape 5mo ago

> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why. Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions. To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?

threetonesun 5mo ago

I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing. The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?

shaky-carrousel 5mo ago

Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.

inglor_cz 5mo ago
Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people. OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy. Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed. I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.
- pixl97 5mo ago
  >who already use or (say by 2030) Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then. >do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed. Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety. You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.

yfw 5mo ago

If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant. Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them

nutjob2 5mo ago

It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of power and provide very few permanent jobs. I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?

Forgeties79 5mo ago

I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashes/#:~:text=In%20August%2C%20a%20dump%20truck,fatal%20crash%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said. https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...

AvAn12 5mo ago

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely. In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop. Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

Legend2440 5mo ago
[flagged]
raincole 5mo ago
> new competition for water Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.
TheTaytay 5mo ago
This whole conversation is happening due to data centers existing…

BrenBarn 5mo ago

I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook). On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?

pesus 5mo ago
> On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely? I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in the coming years in one form or another.

fr4nkr 5mo ago

The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power. Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.

efromvt 5mo ago
I wonder why this doesn’t get us frustrated with the grid, not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.
- TheTaytay 5mo ago
  I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self fulfilling prophecy: don’t build new power plants. Don’t build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can’t keep up…it’s defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different lens.
  - trueno 5mo ago
    I mean one has to also consider the current political _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy needs. And given the current outlook and environments even states are now operating in with federal overreach shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in this reality: - most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment - literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it. so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.

seattle_spring 5mo ago

If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.

gensym 5mo ago

No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's. The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love. The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos. (To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)

ZeWaka 5mo ago

One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.

culi 5mo ago

It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles

physhster 5mo ago

[flagged]

themafia 5mo ago

> For people who support this kind of ban I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that. > would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Has anyone actually done that? Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?

cma 5mo ago

When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state. They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong. A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.

bparsons 5mo ago

Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good. Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.

zdrummond 5mo ago

I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.

LogicFailsMe 5mo ago

Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.

kube-system 5mo ago

I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry. A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.

myhf 5mo ago

Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to move. All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.

sQL_inject 5mo ago

It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions. The rest will fallow.

throwaway27448 5mo ago

It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.

rvz 5mo ago

AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did. Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements. Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-center-energy-forecast-bitcoin-mining https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

cucumber3732842 5mo ago

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.

xphos 5mo ago

Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources. Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it? Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers. I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much

tjohns 5mo ago
> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it? You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about. > Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers. Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
- fc417fc802 5mo ago
  > an excise tax on number of servers We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes. More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
  - xphos 5mo ago
    I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term

nkrisc 5mo ago

It depends what the factory is producing.

neophobia 5mo ago

As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.

SamDc73 5mo ago

yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.

kube-system 5mo ago
It isn't necessary to evenly distribute industry across the entire country out of pettiness. Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.
- SamDc73 5mo ago
  I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms are tied to certain external factors in a way things like data centers aren’t. but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’ so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.
  - kube-system 5mo ago
    The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is not the same in all locations. There are differences in land use, environmental requirements, power generation methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.

carefree-bob 5mo ago

People are worried about their power and water costs rising. I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom. I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario. But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.

pesus 5mo ago

Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?

stego-tech 5mo ago

This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”. The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout. As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands. So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.

freedomben 5mo ago
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”. The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.

jmyeet 5mo ago

So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are: - 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside; - Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people. Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year. So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people. Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize. My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs. Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".

romaniv 5mo ago

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.

dreambuffer 5mo ago

It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.

Nevermark 5mo ago

> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Car parts factory? With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center? I did not know those existed. But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes". A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy! https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813 (For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)

8note 5mo ago

there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not. whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations? data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations

MisterTea 5mo ago

> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts. Those factories employ people. > Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.

harimau777 5mo ago

Several reasons: AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories. AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists. Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them. If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.

hammock 5mo ago

Historically the factories in Maine were mills, which use water for power. Those days are long gone but in a different time you would find no resistance to more factories in Maine, it’s a wasteland now

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

factories aren't as automated as data centers (at least not yet) and still contribute more to the local economy than data centers

QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago

They expect the coming crop of data centers will be used to hurt them, and don’t want them built anywhere?