back to article After contentious Amazon datacenter fight, US county says it has learned a lesson

When we last checked in on Culpeper County, Virginia, folks there were contesting the construction of an Amazon datacenter while officials sought to attract more server-hosting estates to the area. Fast forward a couple of years, and while that proposed Amazon build went ahead in the end, the county's strategy has changed. …

  1. rustftw

    Not surprised

    Not surprised that dealing with Amazon was enough to drive a rethink about handing over acres of land to datacenter builders. I can only imagine the hassle and lobbying. And these facilities are only going to get more intensive, larger, more demanding on local resources, more energy, and if Amazon and Microsoft get their way, operated largely by robots anyway not local people

    I hate to be anti-progress, but I can't help being anti-run-over-by-corporations.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Not surprised

      "I hate to be anti-progress, but I can't help being anti-run-over-by-corporations."

      These data centers don't bring in many jobs for the footprint and resource requirements.

  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Headcount

    A local town ran into the headcount issue here in northeast Iowa. Google put in a data center and got some nice tax breaks for it. Google let them know right from the start (i. e. before they had even selected a city), that it was highly automated and would have under 50 employees (it might have only been like 10 or 20), i mean it'd provide construction work when being built and some extra labor temporarily when they are initially filling it with machines. The town government kept going on about how it would employee hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand. They kept using square footage based estimates based on it being a factory space, despite it being made quite clear it was largely automated (a light on the rack tells if a server or storage has failed, someone powers it down and eventually replace it with new hardware.) Somehow once it ended up with a few dozen employees it came as this HUGE shock to the city government.

    1. midcapwarrior

      Re: Headcount

      Most of those onsite "employees" are security.

      Not quite generation of high paying jobs.

  3. HammerOn1024

    Huh...

    So power is needed to run a data center... who'd a thunk it? Another bunch of idiots.

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