What bugs me is that is really shouldn’t be legal for tech companies to just unilaterally decide that the local residents are going to subsidize their power costs.
But we’re in America, where every single douchy thing a capitalist can do will absolutely be done, and both of our ruling parties will just shrug and keep collecting their bribes in the interim.
Good on the people for waking up to this and fighting back.
It’s more that local authorities are offering incentives to big tech to bring in those data centers, ostensibly because they think it will benefit the area, but more likely because it is benefitting the local authorities personally through kickbacks or campaign donations.
“It’s time to build communities, not data centers,” said one local activist.
A wonderful motto.
This is going to be a huge thing going forward. They are investing hundreds of billions into Ai the coming year and part of that is building many huge data centers that will drive energy prices and water prices up almost certainly.
Energy prices in SoCal have literally doubled in the last year. It’s fucking insane how bad this utility is becoming. I can’t even imagine how much worse it can get with more data centers.
Tangentially relevant: Benn Jordan posted a video about problems with data centers yesterday.
God I love him! Just recommended his other recent video about anarchism and how to defeat surveillance and build mesh the other day!
Jersey bay bee fuck yeah
Good job NJ. Glad to see my state will do the right thing sometimes.
Stupid
Not exactly. Princeton NJ and the surrounding areas are quite wealthy. The wealthy/elites have decided they don’t want their places polluted or to subsidize the costs of these data centers. It certainly wasn’t Newark and Camden that fought and won this.
Yeah how dare communities not allow AI Slop Mines that steal all the water and power not be in their community.
So it’ll be built somewhere else. Data moves around quite easily.
And that’s bad for the harm it will cause to people who are bound to be in a poorer locale, right Facedeer?
Depends entirely on the circumstances of where it does end up being built. I’m not sure what “gotcha” you think you’re making here? That Reddit comment is just me pointing out that when a business uses electricity they pay for it.
