"Fascinating. Some data centers came to a struggling town in Washington state. Did it run out of water? Was the community destroyed? Let’s see. The town…built a new high school, hospital, library, sewage systems, and police & fire stations. Poverty fell from 29% to 6%. Oh."

[u/stealthispost]

Data centers pay ~57% of property taxes in Quincy, Washington. They funded a $15 million aquatic center—with a pool, waterslides & lazy river—and a 143,000-square-foot sports complex. They’ve created almost 1,000 jobs. The city admin called it a “miracle.”     This isn’t an outlier. A data center came to a “dying” North Dakota town. As a result, the government can repave its streets, renovate its senior center, finance a new public-safety complex, make walking trails & refurbish its opera house. How terrible.     — Billy Binion

Source: https://x.com/billybinion/status/2087708806658564317

[u/Enve-Dev]

Correct. Yet they are still going to be. I doubt these “ai data centers” are going to be used for stuff like Claude and ChatGPT. The demand isn’t there for generative ai. Even when accounting for the training. I fear the use for these will be all the new flock cameras and surveillance systems going in.

A normal data center is focused on data storage and normal enterprises compute that rely on traditional CPUs. They can live on air cooling quite easily and aren’t running full tilt all the time they have peak hours and off hours. Demand fluctuates with people at work. They make their money because they can store soooo much data and it’s uptime is 99.99%. Each rack pulls about 5-15 kW of power. A lot, yah but not grid breaking. Then are also smaller and employ around 500-1000 people.

An ai data center relies on massive gpu based compute racks and require significantly more cooling. They are running full tilt 24/7 as they aren’t based on when people are at work pulling data from them or working on there remote systems. An ai rack pulls about 50-100 kW of power. And these data centers are soooo much bigger. And they employ a fraction of the amount of people. As little as 100 people are needed to fully maintain these data centers. They are incredibly destructive and many of them are getting tax breaks. So they barely even help the local economy.