this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Yeah, the main problems right now, seem to be electricity consumption, causing price hikes in surrounding areas.
Its not just electricity but also water consumption, and noise pollution if not particulate pollution too.
They provide little benefit to the surrounding communities with very few jobs by design and just consume local resources at usually discounted bulk rates to sell a service that possibly nobody locally would be in the market for
I have said this before somewhere, but this feels like something that would be very well suited for places where electricity prices have gone extremely low due to "too many solar panels".
Also, in places with excess geothermal output etc.
What are these companies really basing their installation locations upon?
I know at least a few HPC folks talking about building their datacenters far north, where cooling can be done by opening a window.
Which feels to me like terrible policies still. Make big projects pay their costs please!
It's a bit different in this case.
The responsibility of providing electricity falls onto the nearby power plant, which then also has to increase their production.
But the maker of the new electricity consumer does not need to pay for the capital or anything else really, apart from the electrical rates (and some minimal fixed rates) that they are using.
Some governments are coming up with interesting, seemingly effective regulations, though.
What type of regulations are we talking, or at least which country's?
I tried to look for the post but somehow wasn't able to find it (I thought I commented on it).
I don't remember the place, but a part of the policy was that data centers must pay 85% of their projected energy usage.
Here, found an article: https://www.ehn.org/ohio-regulators-make-tech-companies-pay-more-for-energy-hungry-data-centers