Loud, power hungry – opposition grows to datacenters as Maine passes bit barn ban

Loud, thirsty, power hungry, and intensely unpopular with neighboring residents: datacenters are becoming the new nuclear waste dump. And many localities are now saying "not in my backyard." This week, Maine lawmakers became the first in the US to pass a statewide moratorium, pausing approvals for new datacenters with a load of …

[cyberdemon]

No bailouts

Before they try to claim "Oh, we need a bailout now because the gubberments and the ungrateful masses blocked our bit barns": NO - Any AI datacentre that they ever switched on is burning money like a bonfire of cash and rare elements big enough to impress Mr Auric Goldfinger. They have no path to profitability and there is fundamentally no prospect of improving the models beyond their current 'zenith' due to their need of more energy than the earth can supply, and model collapse as they pollute the internet and poison their own input..

If anything, interventions like this are saving them (and their investors/lenders) from their own stupidity

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Maine

Nobody is building GW datacenters in Maine. It's a snowy wilderness that's basically Canada (come the glorious revolution) with no tech industry and is half-a-dozen equally snowy states away from any seat of power.

It's like the Sicily isles having a moratorium on building high speed rail

[Paul Herber]

Re: Maine

Do you mean Sicily or the Isles of Scilly? But both are quite valid.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Maine

Mafia controlled autocomplete

[Paul Herber]

Re: Maine

Clan Kornovii - ruthless.

We should be Sennen them all to jail.

[cd]

Re: Maine

But yet another reason to.move there...

[QET]

Re: Maine

It being cold outside is actually a advantage for datacenters, less energy is wasted on transporting the generated server heat outside.

The snag though is the humid climate doesn't lend itself well to evaporative chilling, which is a favorite of every "fuck you, got mine" datacentre developers who're depleting the available drinking water nearby.

Not to mention that once a datacentre has been constructed, it needs minimal amount of "human support", which is also why a "AI" bit barn popping up in your vicinity is all around a bad deal.

So ignoring evaporative cooling, and cynically, Maine isn't that bad of a place to plop one down

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Maine

Step 1, open the doors to let cold air in and hot air out

Step 2, shovel snow out of server racks

Step 3, profit ?

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Maine

Humidity can actually help. Here's a YouTube from civil engineer Grady Hilhouse's "Practical Engineering" discussing the hyperbolic evaporative cooling towers we see at power plants, and why the dryest environment isn't always best. I'm an electrical engineer, not mechanical/thermal, so I don't understand these diagrams well. (I did take one thermo college course 24 years ago, and I didn't understand it then either!)

Power plants near where I grew up (or am now) tend to take advantage of nearby water: Mississippi River, Lake Erie, etc.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Maine

"Power plants near where I grew up (or am now) tend to take advantage of nearby water: Mississippi River, Lake Erie, etc."

That's not great either as it raises the average temperature of the watercourse and that leads to all sorts of biological problems. Lake Erie isn't as big of an issue as it's much larger, but any additional heat inputs should be studied first. There can certainly be problems in the local area of discharge points.

[rg287]

Re: Maine

It's a snowy wilderness that's basically Canada (come the glorious revolution) with no tech industry and is half-a-dozen equally snowy states away from any seat of power.

Snowy wilderness is good. Makes your cooling cheaper.

Tech industry is irrelevant. A datacentre is a shed full of servers. Half your staff are security or custodial/plant maintenance (Maine will have plenty of HVAC engineers, industrial electricians and genset/diesel technicians). Another quarter of your staff are apprentice server techs running round re-racking hardware or changing failed drives, which is easily trained. After that, you only need a small handful of actual "technical experts" to manage uptime, networking/BGP, etc. And Maine has enough of those.

Also, AI is notionally a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's not hard to train a half-dozen CCNAs from your server techs. From a cash point of view, AI companies can easily, trivially train an entire workforce in-house. A single rack of servers costs more than a years wages for the entire staff. You go where energy is cheap and deal with the manpower as you go.

It's not like AI datacentres are stuffed with MSc engineers clustered around whiteboards building new models. It's an industrial environment, not a high-tech environment. Training up a server technician is no more or less complicated than training a CNC operator, but for some reason the latter is considered blue collar and less qualified than the former even though getting a recalcitrant CNC station calibrated and operating properly is a fine art and no less difficult than fault-finding a rack of hardware.

[Tron]

Relax.

Given the general running costs and the lifespan of xPUs, only governments can afford to pay enough to run AI at a profit, as they are spending other peoples' money. Once your nation's STASI-style needs are met, the rest can be refurbished as Amazon warehouses or left to decay as hubrisoriums - monuments to the AI bubble.

Nominations please for the first abandoned datashed to appear on 'Abandoned Engineering'. Perhaps an El Reg propeller hat to the victor, somewhere down the line.

[cyberdemon]

> only governments can afford to pay enough to run AI at a profit,

I'm not sure how even that counts as "profit"..

Unless you count intellectual suppression, surveillance and subjugation of the people* (at the price of Trillions of dollars, depletion of resources, crashing the stock, debt and bond markets [wait and see!], screwing up the Internet and the concept of verifiable fact, spreading hateful rhetoric, causing an environmental catastrophe, risking WWIII by all of the aforementioned issues plus the prospect of autonomous terminators, and therefore risking a global cataclysm) as some kind of Faustian/Orwellian "bargain"..

* The only "use" for AI as far as I can tell, is to surveil and control, to subvert independent thought and research. It is a "Ministry of Truth" that not only provides false/manipulated information, but sees into your innermost thoughts as you converse with it, and manipulates you like a psychopath. The whole thing needs to die as soon as possible.

It truly is the Spawn of Satan

[Pascal Monett]

"This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Ratepayers ? WTF are those ?

Don't you mean TAXpayers ?

Could you please stop changing the English language for no good reason ?

Have a coffee before posting bullshit like that, for Heaven's sake.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

"Ratepayers" is perfectly valid legalese for the customers of a utility -- the ones who PAY the rates (as set by the utility) for the energy provided.

[doublelayer]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

No, they couldn't, because in your zeal to defend the English language, you've failed to understand what they were talking about and ended up looking foolish. When they say "rate payers", they mean people who pay for power, to a utility which is not a government, at the set rate for residential or commercial electricity (as opposed to those who have a specific deal for a different payment plan such as reserved arrangements)). In most countries, electricity is not provided by governments and not paid for out of general taxation, so the rates are not taxes, even in those countries where the rates are set by law instead of by the private-ish market.

Language changes at times so people can better understand each other. Sometimes, it changes for annoying reasons that don't help. But to understand whether this is language changing for a logical reason, language changing for an annoying reason, or language not changing at all (this case), the first unavoidable step which many self-appointed language guardians skip is to understand what people are saying, in full detail, and why they chose to say it that way. Only then can an opinion on whether they should say it that way be justified.

[rg287]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Ratepayers ? WTF are those ?

so the rates are not taxes,

Also, aside from electricity, rates may refer to Business Rates or Council Tax (i.e. local tax collected by a local council, as opposed to Income or Corporation Tax collected by National Government).

Since it tends to be the local councils that end up paying for local roads maintenance and some combination of local utility infrastructure (depending on jurisdication), it is indeed that authority and it's rate payers who will end up with the bill for supporting mega-DCs - even as those same companies are pleading poverty and expecting tax breaks from national government on the pretence of R&D or innovation. In the US, State Governments are correct to be scpetical about offering State-level tax breaks to AI companies claiming to want to "invest" in their state.

Happily, Business Rates (in the UK) are one of the hardest to evade or even avoid. Got property? Pay the fuck up. Doesn't matter if the ownership is registered to a tax haven and avoids national Corporation Tax - the registered property owes Rates in the district/county where it is.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Maximum Frenchman achieved: correcting English speakers on their own language.

[ecofeco]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Americans need all the help they can get. And so do I on some days :(

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

[MachDiamond]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

"According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level."

Going by postings online, I thought it was far worse than that. I suppose there are people that are so uneducated that a computer isn't very useful to them. Sending emojis back and forth is about the level of their comprehension.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

It's not really surprising because if you don't use it you lose it. A 6th graders job is to read increasingly complexed material for 8 hours.

English isn't the most consistent language too read or write. For example "uneducated" should be zero-sum like unhinged, unwound and undone but instead it's almost exclusively used as some undetermined ambiguous value.

[retiredFool]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

I can think of one who is president off the top of my head. And probably the what 46% who voted for him are probably in the same category. Add in the 8% or so that did not vote and voila 54%.

[MachDiamond]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

"Ratepayers ? WTF are those ?"

Those are the people that are going to see the rates they pay the utilities goes through the roof when the AI bubble bursts and all of the expensive and rapid generation expansion is idled.

The taxpayers are also likely to get hit (same people affected, different pain point) when the utilities find themselves hugely over-extended. The government (more explicity, the politicians) will be forced to bail out the utilities. They can't allow a whole region to go dark.

[rg287]

Re: "This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Ratepayers ? WTF are those ?

Don't you mean TAXpayers ?

Could you please stop changing the English language for no good reason ?

They're referring to those paying electric rates. Which is the rate payable for your power, including infrastructure costs.

However, this is a BRITISH site (albeit less so these days), and in BRITAIN, Business Rates are a type of tax payable by businesses to local councils for doing things like maintaining the local roads, and also feeds into Fire and Policing budgets, etc.

It is well understood (or should be) that rate-payers are tax-payers, and it is not uncommon to hear councillors talk about getting "the best deal for rate-payers". It is not unreasonable that a British site like El Reg might use the phrase "rate payers" in relation to local or state government taxes. We're English you see (I mean, I'm not, I'm Welsh. But even I know that!).

[Downeaster]

Maine has had Data Center Proposals

As someone who lives in Maine, we have had proposals for data centers. One in Eastport, Maine they want to build underwater to use the world's highest tides on the Bay of Fundy to power the center and for cooling. Another they want to build at the former Loring Air Force Base in Northern Maine. There are others proposals for data centers in other rural and urban areas. Many people in Maine are opposed to them because the cost of our electricity here is some of the highest in the nation. Adding data centers would probably raise prices on electricity a lot. The public shouldn't have to pay for the cost of electrical generation for data centers. Mainers often also have a NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) attitude. We don't want to ruin the beauty of where we live. This preserves our way of life but also hurts us economically. Rural Maine also has had several big projects proposed over the years in such things as energy, manufacturing, and other areas. These are often proposed by less than reputable companies and they don't work out financially. Companies can't get the financing to build them. So we are cautious on data centers. There also are not a lot of regulations yet for data centers and economically they may be a big bubble like when the Internet bubble burst. These bubbles or trends drive the economy of a country or industry for a while, then they burst or pop. Some of these bubbles pop in a big way and others settle down slowly. Data centers are good in some ways but don't provide jobs like manufacturing does. They also create a strain on the local environment economically and in other ways. So Maine is being cautious.

[PRR]

Re: Maine has had Data Center Proposals

> Many people in Maine are opposed to them because the cost of our electricity here is some of the highest in the nation.

Downeaster too. 15 years ago it wasn't so bad. Recent years, arggh! A marginal operator pays young men to go door-to-door for sign-ups to 'discount electricity'. 5 years ago I laughed them off my land. This year it sounds better (probably still a sucker play).

Most folks are opposed (also to the unrelated but similar project to pipe Quebec electricity to Boston). However Governor Janet is hesitant to ban megadata cuz "jobs". After the initial building and server setting, what jobs? She may be confused with other projects where high equipment costs "imply" high local labor costs (payrolls). But I'm sure the servers will be remotely managed. Maybe one/two $15/hr 'guards'? I like Janet, but if she loses her job, a gal has to think about retirement funding.

[Pete 2]

Upsides and downsides

> many localities are now saying "not in my backyard."

It would be interesting to see the repercussions if communities that banned infrastructure (not just datacentres, but solar farms, electric pylons, new roads, factories and plenty of other "objectionable" developments) were then denied usage of said facilities.

So for example, if a county, as an example of a reasonably sized geographical entity, refused permission for an Amazon warehouse, then Amazon could respond with OK, no deliveries for your addresses. Or alternatively, those places that do allow such building, to see an advantage such as discounted deliveries, cheaper power or faster AI response times.

After all, having to put up with the disadvantages of such developments, should provide the neighbourhoods in question with something beneficial in return

[short]

Re: Upsides and downsides

"After all, having to put up with the disadvantages of such developments, should provide the neighbourhoods in question with something beneficial in return"

Yeah, about that 'should'. At best, we get a one-off community payment that'll fund the painting of our village hall. In exchange for being utterly fucked over by a bunch of NSIPs packed into a tiny place, which happens to be where we live. There is _no_ upside.

They're NSIPs - we don't get to say no. They take our land, destroy our lives and livelihoods, and repaint the village hall. Can't move away, can't stay. We're fucked.

[Pete 2]

Re: Upsides and downsides

> There is _no_ upside

Of course there is. It just isn't right in front of your nose.

Where I live, the past few years has seen a dramatic rise in the number of electricity distribution pylons. They have been built to carry "green" electricity from the renewable generators to the towns and cities that require it. The "upside" is a cleaner planet, reduced warming and less environmental damage.

Sure, the pylons are unsightly, but that is a small inconvenience compared with banning them and actively sabotaging initiatives get off fossil fuels.

[short]

Re: Upsides and downsides

_You_ might be getting a pylon or two, and be fine with that. _We_ are getting a massive substation, two new hundred foot tall HVDC converter buildings which are loud 24/7, all on land that we and our neighbours are currently living on and farming. Total build is coming to about 200 acres, even before the infill projects start.

And we already had a substation a mile away, and 132kV pylons to feed it. I'm hardly averse to infrastructure.

Don't tell me it's a small inconvenience. They are destroying my smallholding, and we'll probably, hopefully, get the going rate for the strips of land they're taking, denying us access to the rest. Then we get to live on a building site for most of a decade. Then we get to live on an industrial estate. We'll have to get rid of the livestock, no grazing land left. Get rid of the horses which are our pets, as there's no hay and no grazing. It's not as if we can buy replacement land hat we can get to. And then we get to watch the destruction, since we can't move away. If I sound pissed, it's because I am.

It may be a small inconvenience when averaged out across the population - but for those of us being fucked over, it is complete.

It's going to be built, and that's good for the country, but we'd quite like to be treated reasonably, and there's no sign of that happening so far.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Upsides and downsides

"Where I live, the past few years has seen a dramatic rise in the number of electricity distribution pylons. "

Howdy, neighbor.

[ChoHag]

Re: Upsides and downsides

But they do get something beneficial. They get to enjoy the sight of a squat ugly concrete box which consumes all the local resources while providing no jobs and exports any of the money it earns out of the state and/or country, and that goes hand-in-hand with the warm fuzzy feeling that a billionaire has got slightly richer at their expense.

You're right, it's a win/win!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Upsides and downsides

Knowing some people there, I am pretty convinced they'd prefer an emac/emac ...

[MachDiamond]

Re: Upsides and downsides

"while providing no jobs and exports any of the money it earns out of the state and/or country"

The politicians get nice new briefcases delivered by discrete hand off.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Upsides and downsides

"It would be interesting to see the repercussions if communities that banned infrastructure (not just datacentres, but solar farms, electric pylons, new roads, factories and plenty of other "objectionable" developments) were then denied usage of said facilities."

I have a hard time believing there would be such retaliation. Most of these enterprises are relying on getting paid to locate their facilities by government agencies. Amazon refusing to ship to a certain area due to be denied a permit to build a facility would hurt Amazon more than that city. People denied the ability to purchase from Amazon, will blame Amazon which won't look good.

The size, noise and use of local utilities in exchange for very few jobs and a degraded quality of life isn't a good trade and people are seeing this. A solar farm being proposed that would cover up productive agricultural land is a problem. California is getting a lot of this since ag land is far less expensive. Developers buy it and then make a few payments to get the zoning changed so they can pour concrete and asphalt over the top of it. As a photographer, it used to be frustrating to have a beautiful vista spoiled by pylons, but now it's a click of a button to make them go away. Roads can be a problem when government will spend billions to expand freeways (motorways) and not a rusty credit to implement more/better public transportation (HELLO Texas, is anybody in there? Is there anyone at home?). Roads unlock land use, but I get it, enough already, wider freeways don't unlock anything. Lucid Stew on Youtube brings up some really good points when it come to transportation even if I disagree with him about HSR in the USA.

[rg287]

Re: Upsides and downsides

After all, having to put up with the disadvantages of such developments, should provide the neighbourhoods in question with something beneficial in return

Well quite. If you have solar farms, you have electric. If you have pylons, you can distribute it. If you have roads, you can move about more easily than hiking cross-country.

What benefit does a community get from a Gigawatt-class datacentre in their backyard?

And don't say jobs. The jobs-per-sq-ft are far smaller than literally any other place of employment, bar perhaps quarrying, mining and agriculture.

It's interesting that communities are objecting the latter, not the former. Quite the obvious strawman you've built there.

[Blackjack]

An explainer using monkeys

youtube.com/watch?v=9_3u5CBH6Ao

[MachDiamond]

"An explainer using monkeys"

They look more like apes. Use the M word and the librarian will demonstrate what's meant by "going ape shit".

[Albert Coates]

Oook

[martinusher]

Shoulod be Discouraged

Not just for the obvious reasons but because this type of sprawling, power hungry facility is obviously a technology that's going to be obsolete well before it ever pays its way. Unfortunately a combination of FOMO, investment froth and 'fake it till you make it' means we have to have these centers because if we don't get them first 'the other guy' will have them and that will obviously be a disaster.

We seem to not just be investing in technology that's likely to rapidly become obsolete but also in our ideas about how such technology should be used. I just don't fancy spending the rest of my life paying for a whole bunch of white elephants.

[ecofeco]

Re: Shoulod be Discouraged

Someone gets it.

And nailed it.

"Unfortunately a combination of FOMO, investment froth and 'fake it till you make it' means we have to have these centers because if we don't get them first 'the other guy' will have them and that will obviously be a disaster."

[MachDiamond]

Re: Shoulod be Discouraged

"because if we don't get them first 'the other guy' will have them and that will obviously be a disaster."

The money isn't made in the owning of the datacenters, but in the outputs. This might be one of those instances where it's much better to outsource. Next year when somebody else has better, faster, cheaper data services, use them instead and not be stuck with thousands of square meters of obsolete tech that will cost money to dispose of.

When I had a manufacturing company, there were things that made more sense to buy in than to make in house. We did run some numbers to know when it might be useful to do certain things ourselves. The cost of the kit wasn't much of a factor, it was having the staff that could run it, the cost of the floor space and ongoing cost to keep it going. For something such as a CNC lathe, we'd need to have a part that would run full time, four days a week since change-overs are an expense so while the parts for several different products could be made, frequent changes to the set up ate up the margins. Trying to overcome that by doing longer runs of a given part would lead to excessive inventory on the shelf. There were companies that I could engage to make the parts on really expensive machines that had robo-load/unload and really good staff that could set up new parts really fast. Again, the cost of the machine was swamped out by the cost of an operator that was really good with that machine.

[MachDiamond]

NAACP

The NAACP complaint is racist. They state specifically that the downsides of having a data center in a neighborhood is another ploy to keep the black person down. They could just state that the datacenters are locating in areas where the land is cheap and that's often where there are predominately non-white neighborhoods. I'm still not buying it, but the way they are wording their arguments should give them zero credibility.

[retiredFool]

LA, 5GW

Are you kidding me. TX as a state runs around 50-60GW. I'd guess LA as a state runs around 20-25GW for the entire state. So around 20% of an entire state to run ONE data center for faceplant? Are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don’t run them on Maines power

Use batteries

I’m going.

[Dinanziame]

Loud?

Are datacenters really loud? I understand they need cooling, but since noise implies a waste of power, I'd have assumed they don't have ventilators that can be heard more than a hundred metres away?

[short]

Re: Loud?

The roar from air handlers can be pervasive and relentless, but I think the ones that really piss people off (with noise) are running local generation - either big diesel or gas turbines.

If you bear in mind that grid connection times are pushing out to a decade, and these datacentres are riding a short term hype cycle, they're going to need local generation (hence extra-noisy shipping container based stuff, in substantial numbers), 'just until the grid connection comes through'. That, 24/7 , will really get on your nerves as a neighbor.

This kind of thing doesn't look like fun to have dumped next door...

https://indiandefencereview.com/elon-musk-owns-26-400-mw-gas-turbines-to-power-his-own-ai-but-he-forgot-one-critical-detail-obtaining-the-required-permits/