To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.
Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.
So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.
As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.
[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)
In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits.
I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.
I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure.
The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
But are they really at the same level of disruption as any steel, chemical, nuclear, gas, manufacturing, recycling... plant? A mine? A port? Industrial farming?
I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.
In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.
Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.
Noise pollution is huge and water usage is through the roof which could worsen the effect of droughts where water is already scarce. Not to mention the imbalances they generate on power distribution.
A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, but would also bring massive truck loads to the local roads and corresponding pollution. The low staffing of datacenters means that one they are built there is little transportation impact.
Aren't DC remotely managed for almost everything? How does a DC in Paris, Alabama benefit the locals if 99% of the well paid jobs for it are done in the Bay Area?
The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.
The idea of having what equates to trade tariffs for data transfers sounds horrifying. But to be fair, we are kinda suffering similar charges already from all major cloud providers, and we seem to be okay with it... Still horrifying, but not entirely unprecedented I suppose.
They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.
The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.
Don’t forget security guards. These data centers will be a huge target for both thieves and saboteurs. Unless the ai promoters are right that AI will be a great thing for everyone and not at all a source of societal and political strain.
> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.
Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.
Many jurisdictions have lower property taxes for certain kinds of industrial/commercial zoning in the name of bringing in jobs, etc. You sometimes see clusters of businesses at border areas of jurisdictions for this reason. Sometimes it's other advantages. Bottled water companies often take advantage of cheaper municipal water for "industrial" use, for example.
the law addresses exactly this. it greatly overtaxes datacenter in green spaces and lowers taxes in former industrial areas.
Regarding whether it's a good development drive... I can tell you, most companies could save a shitload of money by buying a few pallets of machines and racking them in a... datacenter.
I see our monthly AWS bill, I highly doubt we'd be spending that in datacenter bills.
It's worse than that. Data centers aren't a net zero for the area, they're a net negative. They use up water, arguably pollute said water [1], they jack up the price of everybody's electricity (because everyone else ends up paying for the extra infrastructure), can cause pollution directly (eg xAI runs highly-polluting gas turbines in a city through a legal loophole of them being "mobile" [2]) and aren't the quiet, unseen facilities proponents make them out to be (eg [3]).
On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.
I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.
Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
As an Italian, I second that this is clearly a populist manoeuvre. Nobody in their sound mind would ever build a big datacentre in Northern Italy, the energy costs are way too expensive. There is no untapped hydro power available, fossil fuel is obviously always going to be more expensive than elsewhere, no nuclear power and you can't roll in a massive solar array with batteries due to how cramped the Po Valley already is. It would ironically make more sense to build it in Southern Italy, where once the political issues are sorted out, the access to wind and solar power are way easier and there are a lot of underdeveloped areas.
But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
Europe can opt out if they want, hyperscalers are building in South Asia, SEA and MENA where they get tax breaks. We'll see how that plays out for Europe.
Exactly. There are plenty of data centers being built in places that want them. The neat thing about data is that it's a quick speed of light to anywhere on the planet, so it doesn't matter where they are.
Anyone who wants to opt out can do so and it'll play out just fine for them.
The Luddite movement wasn’t opposed to progress or technology. They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?
> Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite?
The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.
Most uses of the word "Luddite" - and I'd venture to guess this one included - don't refer to the original aims of Luddites but the modern connotation of maximally pejorative "anti-technologists" in the broadest sense.
My definition of Luddite doesn’t matter, the person I responded to clearly used it in a pejorative way to describe people who are resistant to new technologies (likely irrational)
Engineers, in general, tend to be libertarians and have a positive outlook on capitalism. They are, in general, people that have no roots, or any sense of culture or taste.
Which is why they are uncritical towards what we call progress - they are not in a position where they could lose their culture, their roots, their home because they do not possess anything like that. They are men without qualities, revelling in their obsession with optimisation, mowing everything down that may introduce friction in their parasitic nature.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
I still haven't seen anybody demonstrating we have to do such thing.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
The way I see it, we hit a ceiling with the capabilities of AI. Singularity will most likely not happen (not with the resource hunger of current methods). What remains are incredible tools to help remove the most tedious tasks from everyone's work.
Which leaves us with plenty of time to take a stroll in our drought-stricken nearby park. What fun we'll have reading the placards of all of the species that used to exist in the nearby creek.
Or if we're above wet bulb climate conditions again, we just watch the newest algorithm invent stories for us built on the uncredited labor of real artists.
>It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
The future doesn't always care about what the majority wishes since not everything is up for debate, like for instance the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons, or whether your neighbor or allies suddenly decide to invade you.
AI is front and center of any new digital product these days. More and more tedious tasks are automated using agents, even in small businesses. Assuming Europe won't invest in datacenters, eventually it will find itself in a position where it is completely dependent on US and Chinese companies providing the core to such solutions to them. This will eventually lead to a situation where more and more value creation will flow towards these economies.
> But blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.
I am usually apposed to any tax on anyone or any entity for any reason but I am also jaded after a lifetime of seeing taxes almost entirely go to fraud waste and abuse that only grows with time and very rarely ever shrinks. me and my weird fantasies about implementing the code of bushidō in all governments.
This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.
Yes and no. There is money allocated to grow specific crops and if it were up to me that would vanish. Farmers would go back to growing what the economy was demanding and not artificially propping up non edible corn for ethanol.
I would take vehicles in two directions. EV's where it makes sense and hyper efficient hybrid vehicles that emit clean exhaust and get 150+mpg to fill some EV gaps.
My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?
Just had to read few more paragraphs : "the use of disused former industrial areas is favoured. In this case there are no additional burdens, but rather the law proposes bureaucratic simplifications."
It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"
Indeed, I don't quite understand the issue. I get that the data centers are big and expensive, but they must be nothing compared to any ordinary heavy-industry site right? In all aspects: space, pollution, energy, water...
Sure, why not. But if you drop an AI datacenter in the middle of an agricultural area, you won't be able to find it. Because AI datacenters are actually tiny by comparison.
The concept of land ownership is somewhat flawed (how can you "own" something that existed before you and will outlast you) and there's a finite amount of land available for various purposes, so for the benefit of humanity/civilisation it can make sense to ensure that land with certain properties is kept for the purpose of growing food or for hosting particular ecosystems (e.g. rivers).
Even if it's not agricultural land, there can be strategically important pieces of land that a country will insist cannot be sold to organisations that are opposed to the values of that country. However, in those cases, it might make more sense for the state to make compulsory purchases of that land.
This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.
Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.
Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.
Please let's not fool ourselves that AI businesses don't care about costs because they have a lot of money. They burn a lot of money, yes, but they are looking for profitability and they won't achieve it with a 200% tax on top of large energy bills and hardware expenses.
The timing can make a big difference though, as they might be happy to burn through money to get better adoption, especially if that pumps up their stock price. Also, if the executive making the decision is looking to jump ship, then they might not care about the long term impact.
you can eat food and drink water, though. use the tax revenue to directly support food and water via investing it in agriculture, food imports, water sanitation, etc.
the water thing is exaggerated when it comes to data centers.
but playing along with it: you just raise the % tax increase until it covers the cost of importing/cleaning the water or whatever other negative externality the data center causes.
the concept is similar to "fuck you" pricing of construction contracts. you place a bid that is super high (i.e. the 200% tax), and you're happy either way. if you land the job (data center is built), you make insane profits (tax) to be used elsewhere (cleaning water, green initiatives, or whatever). if you don't land the job (data center not built), that is great too, you didn't really want it anyways.
one thing is absolutely certain, though: humans will never build so many data centers that we run out of water. water scarcity will be from other causes.
Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.
LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.
There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.
But EU does not pay farmers to farm efficiently and produce more food but does it to keep inefficient ones going so not much to do with actual food security.
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
That was true 30 years ago, but is less true today. That doesn't mean farmers don't have inordinate power, but that's the same in most developed countries with rural areas (see also, the USA, Japan, etc).
This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.
As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.)
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.
We already produce far more food than we need. The amount of land in the US used for corn ethanol production alone is the size of a medium European country.
Data centers are not displacing food. That argument is disingenuous. Even in Italy agricultural land goes unused because of low demand.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.
There's no problem the more conventional practice of letting animals graze the majority of the year. If we didn't use those fields to feed and eat the animals, the grass would turn into CO2 and methane anyway. Or turn into boring forests.
Not everything has to be optimal. That thinking leads to Thanos' snap. People generally enjoy meat. They also enjoy the landscape farmers created.
Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
Just because it is scarce doesn't mean it is productive.
I have friends with farms and agricultural businesses in Italy. A lot of agricultural land is no longer cultivated by the families that own it because market prices are well below the cost of production in Italy.
One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.
But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.
I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.
Directly, sure. Indirectly, they have created many millions of jobs. Tens of millions at the very lowest. There are nearly 30 million web developers alone.
the problem is that many of those jobs often aren't in the locale. by necessity, car factory workers work, live, spend money, and pay taxes in the same general area as the car factory. that does not hold true for web developers (which may be in entirely different countries).
Many of which are bullshit jobs...
Just because something generates a job, it doesn't make that something automatically a good thing with a net impact on our world and society. There are many more boxes to tick.
What damage do you have in mind? I live next to a big cluster of data centers, second biggest in Europe, and I haven't seen anything like "damage" from them.
To me, datacenters, especially for AI (which tolerates an extra hundred ms of latency quite well) seem like an unusual form of development. Many forms of development have similar downsides: they destroy green space, they can be noisy, they compete for energy resources [0], etc. On the flip side, though, most new developments add substantial value: jobs, tax revenue, increased industry around them, local availability of their outputs, etc.
Datacenters are weird: they come with the negatives (although, per unit energy consumption, they’re relatively innocuous), but they seem to be missing most of the regional benefits. They don’t create many jobs. They pay little in taxes. They don’t actually produce anything that makes anyone else want to further develop the surrounding area. Their outputs offer little benefit to the community that wouldn’t be provided nearly as well by a datacenter somewhere else.
So I actually get why it makes sense to support development but oppose new datacenters. Or to have an added tax on datacenters so that at least some economic benefit is captured.
As an interesting contrast, a colo facility is a bit different: I want to have colo datacenters near by so that I can use their services. But this isn’t what the new development is about.
[0] Some of which are finite in a given region or are preferable not to use. (But don’t forget that more energy use = increased production in the long term, which can be a very good thing.)
> Datacenters are weird
In the same way that most public utilities are: train stations, railway lines, airports, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, military bases and a hundred other things. The negatives are concentrated to the locality and everyone else reaps the benefits.
I get it if you wish to put a 99% self-sufficiency condition (water/power etc) but everything else reeks of luddism and nimbyism.
I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure.
The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
But are they really at the same level of disruption as any steel, chemical, nuclear, gas, manufacturing, recycling... plant? A mine? A port? Industrial farming?
I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.
In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.
I think the idea that they raise outdoor temps over a wide area is a myth spread on facebook. The physics doesn't work out.
Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.
Noise pollution is huge and water usage is through the roof which could worsen the effect of droughts where water is already scarce. Not to mention the imbalances they generate on power distribution.
A warehouse or factory would have more jobs, but would also bring massive truck loads to the local roads and corresponding pollution. The low staffing of datacenters means that one they are built there is little transportation impact.
> A warehouse or factory would have more jobs,
It would add low value-added jobs though (unskilled labor). Datacenters add high value-added jobs (skilled labor).
Only looking at the headcount is shortsighted imho.
Aren't DC remotely managed for almost everything? How does a DC in Paris, Alabama benefit the locals if 99% of the well paid jobs for it are done in the Bay Area?
And there is almost zero value generated locally.
Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.
You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.
The idea of having what equates to trade tariffs for data transfers sounds horrifying. But to be fair, we are kinda suffering similar charges already from all major cloud providers, and we seem to be okay with it... Still horrifying, but not entirely unprecedented I suppose.
Where? What do you tax? Per request?
They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.
The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.
>What do you tax?
Physical infrastructure inputs and negative externalities.
For example: electrical grid strain, water table consumption for cooling, and local pollution/carbon footprints.
Don’t forget security guards. These data centers will be a huge target for both thieves and saboteurs. Unless the ai promoters are right that AI will be a great thing for everyone and not at all a source of societal and political strain.
> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.
I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.
Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.
Many jurisdictions have lower property taxes for certain kinds of industrial/commercial zoning in the name of bringing in jobs, etc. You sometimes see clusters of businesses at border areas of jurisdictions for this reason. Sometimes it's other advantages. Bottled water companies often take advantage of cheaper municipal water for "industrial" use, for example.
Because company profits are booked at their European HQ (so Ireland or Luxembourg).
So there is little profit being taxed at the Datacenter/country Level.
> they destroy green space
the law addresses exactly this. it greatly overtaxes datacenter in green spaces and lowers taxes in former industrial areas.
Regarding whether it's a good development drive... I can tell you, most companies could save a shitload of money by buying a few pallets of machines and racking them in a... datacenter.
I see our monthly AWS bill, I highly doubt we'd be spending that in datacenter bills.
It's worse than that. Data centers aren't a net zero for the area, they're a net negative. They use up water, arguably pollute said water [1], they jack up the price of everybody's electricity (because everyone else ends up paying for the extra infrastructure), can cause pollution directly (eg xAI runs highly-polluting gas turbines in a city through a legal loophole of them being "mobile" [2]) and aren't the quiet, unseen facilities proponents make them out to be (eg [3]).
On top of all that they typically get massive subsidies and tax credits. Why? Because the DC might go somewhere else, allegedly. Where? Nobody wants it. Everybody knows the politicians approving all this are getting bought or just coerced.
I'd love to see a single example of where one of these data centers was welcomed by the community or somehow a net positive.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
[2]: https://earthjustice.org/case/xai-illegal-gas-power-plant-da...
[3]: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/n...
Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction. It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
Sure, people feel somewhat AI-fatigued, but blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
As an Italian, I second that this is clearly a populist manoeuvre. Nobody in their sound mind would ever build a big datacentre in Northern Italy, the energy costs are way too expensive. There is no untapped hydro power available, fossil fuel is obviously always going to be more expensive than elsewhere, no nuclear power and you can't roll in a massive solar array with batteries due to how cramped the Po Valley already is. It would ironically make more sense to build it in Southern Italy, where once the political issues are sorted out, the access to wind and solar power are way easier and there are a lot of underdeveloped areas.
But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.
Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure
Just read the article
> There are already 33 active data centres in the Milan metropolitan area alone; a further 10 are under construction and 23 under evaluation.
Sometimes you will need to do stuff even if energy is not cheap. Come on (I’m italian too)
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
OOC, which past exactly do you want to go back to (and presumably stay at)?
Europe can opt out if they want, hyperscalers are building in South Asia, SEA and MENA where they get tax breaks. We'll see how that plays out for Europe.
Exactly. There are plenty of data centers being built in places that want them. The neat thing about data is that it's a quick speed of light to anywhere on the planet, so it doesn't matter where they are.
Anyone who wants to opt out can do so and it'll play out just fine for them.
> So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”?
what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers
We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.
The Luddite movement wasn’t opposed to progress or technology. They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
Interesting — so in your opinion every country must build out datacenters or be left behind?
I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
To a point, yes. Otherwise you are at the mercy of whoever's compute you use.
This is a lot of assertions with zero evidence.
* fantastic technology [citation needed]
* economic suicide [citation needed]
Try Claude Code for a weekend. Maybe that clears up the confusion about how amazing AI can be.
You can also take a look at North Korea as an example of a nation that decided the industrial revolution was one to sit out.
Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?
> Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite?
The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.
These days being labeled a terrorist is almost a mark of honor.
Remember the ones defining who’s a terrorist are pedophiles.
Well, that depends. How much do you actually know about the Luddites, versus making assumptions vs their use as a pejorative in pop culture?
The more our definition of "Luddite" becomes historically accurage, the more it is true that yes, the HN audience is composed of people like that.
Most uses of the word "Luddite" - and I'd venture to guess this one included - don't refer to the original aims of Luddites but the modern connotation of maximally pejorative "anti-technologists" in the broadest sense.
> The more our definition of "Luddite" becomes historically accurage, the more it is true that yes, the HN audience is composed of people like that.
Ah yeah, the people of HN, well known for burning down datacenters.
My definition of Luddite doesn’t matter, the person I responded to clearly used it in a pejorative way to describe people who are resistant to new technologies (likely irrational)
Engineers, in general, tend to be libertarians and have a positive outlook on capitalism. They are, in general, people that have no roots, or any sense of culture or taste. Which is why they are uncritical towards what we call progress - they are not in a position where they could lose their culture, their roots, their home because they do not possess anything like that. They are men without qualities, revelling in their obsession with optimisation, mowing everything down that may introduce friction in their parasitic nature.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
I think we need a citation about the libertarian / capitalism thing? I know a lot of leftist engineers. Look how blue the bay area votes?
I still haven't seen anybody demonstrating we have to do such thing.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
> Datacenters need cheap energy, something no region in Europe is having in abundance (except maybe Norway, Sweden, and Finland). I don't think Lombardy was seeing too much DC construction
There's a contradiction between your two first sentences…
wow, I'm so excited for this "future" where everyone is laid off and miserable
The way I see it, we hit a ceiling with the capabilities of AI. Singularity will most likely not happen (not with the resource hunger of current methods). What remains are incredible tools to help remove the most tedious tasks from everyone's work.
Which leaves us with plenty of time to take a stroll in our drought-stricken nearby park. What fun we'll have reading the placards of all of the species that used to exist in the nearby creek.
Or if we're above wet bulb climate conditions again, we just watch the newest algorithm invent stories for us built on the uncredited labor of real artists.
it's happening whether you like it or not.
>It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards
No. In northern italy alone we have tens of thousands unused warehouse spaces.
Let's use that space for datacenters and solar farms instead of destroying forever yet another plot of fertile land.
If data centers will also bring nuclear to power them, i'm all for it. But let's be honest: realistically they will be powered by coal, maybe gas.
As to why we have so much unused warehouses: some legally have no owner, some have declared bankrupcy and will be leased at absurd prices (it will cost half to build a new one), some were costructed illegaly and all stay there in the limbo because the local administrations would have to pay to reclaim the land
> It's just typical green politics. Forever backwards.
I believe it has more to do with preserving the landscape that attracts so many tourists.
Solar farms in Italy faced resistance for the same reason.
It's not green politics.
Pretty sure blocking it will work perfectly.
You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.
The future is what we as humans decide it to be.
Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.
The future doesn't always care about what the majority wishes since not everything is up for debate, like for instance the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons, or whether your neighbor or allies suddenly decide to invade you.
> blocking the future won't play out nicely
What does that even mean?
AI is front and center of any new digital product these days. More and more tedious tasks are automated using agents, even in small businesses. Assuming Europe won't invest in datacenters, eventually it will find itself in a position where it is completely dependent on US and Chinese companies providing the core to such solutions to them. This will eventually lead to a situation where more and more value creation will flow towards these economies.
But in this case what does a country lose by blocking any and all data centers in its borders? A few ms latency?
> But blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.
Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?
I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.
That's very close to a coin flip.
This is surely a huge blow to all the hyperscalers looking to build datacenters in the agricultural regions of Italy.
I am usually apposed to any tax on anyone or any entity for any reason but I am also jaded after a lifetime of seeing taxes almost entirely go to fraud waste and abuse that only grows with time and very rarely ever shrinks. me and my weird fantasies about implementing the code of bushidō in all governments.
This will be an unpopular opinion as I have many but if these taxes are allocated 100% to offsetting taxes and costs for the farmers then I would support it but I am not in Italy so thankfully it does not matter what I or most people think. Farmers have thin margins and have to compensate for weather that they do not control. They are also very under appreciated which is bizarre to me given they provide our food.
Isn't there already enough graft directed towards farmers?
Yes and no. There is money allocated to grow specific crops and if it were up to me that would vanish. Farmers would go back to growing what the economy was demanding and not artificially propping up non edible corn for ethanol.
I would take vehicles in two directions. EV's where it makes sense and hyper efficient hybrid vehicles that emit clean exhaust and get 150+mpg to fill some EV gaps.
Who needs computers, anyways
My Italian is not as good as it used to be. Does anyone know what the current tax is? I mean, is this going from 1% -> 2-3%, or is it a more meaningful increase?
> built in green/agricultural areas
So they want them in other areas instead? Like next to residential area?
I'm not sure they understand the implications...
Just had to read few more paragraphs : "the use of disused former industrial areas is favoured. In this case there are no additional burdens, but rather the law proposes bureaucratic simplifications."
It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"
Perhaps an AI summary would have helped here
old industrial areas, which sometimes are pretty far from residential ones
>Like next to residential area?
or... industrial areas?
Indeed, I don't quite understand the issue. I get that the data centers are big and expensive, but they must be nothing compared to any ordinary heavy-industry site right? In all aspects: space, pollution, energy, water...
Sure, why not. But if you drop an AI datacenter in the middle of an agricultural area, you won't be able to find it. Because AI datacenters are actually tiny by comparison.
This is the way
I don't understand why they're looking to increase the tax rather than just banning them.
Italian farmers pay effectively 0% taxes on land and the areas are quite poor. Data centers on the other hand pay lots of taxes.
Why would they ban productive uses of land?
Obviously because they care more about things than just making money.
> Obviously because they care more about things than just making money.
why should someone be banned from selling their land if they want?
The concept of land ownership is somewhat flawed (how can you "own" something that existed before you and will outlast you) and there's a finite amount of land available for various purposes, so for the benefit of humanity/civilisation it can make sense to ensure that land with certain properties is kept for the purpose of growing food or for hosting particular ecosystems (e.g. rivers).
Even if it's not agricultural land, there can be strategically important pieces of land that a country will insist cannot be sold to organisations that are opposed to the values of that country. However, in those cases, it might make more sense for the state to make compulsory purchases of that land.
That's very black and white.
They don't pay "lots" of taxes. They pay taxes for the two engineers and 8 janitors working there.
You can’t eat data centers
1/3 of food produced isn't eaten either.
This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.
Except when the AI businesses have lots of available money, so they might not care about the extra taxes (they're spending billions anyway). There's also the problem that they might destroy the future agricultural worth of the land with e.g. polluted waste water.
Given that they don't want agricultural land used for data centers, it makes more sense to just ban them rather than allowing it if they get some extra cash.
Please let's not fool ourselves that AI businesses don't care about costs because they have a lot of money. They burn a lot of money, yes, but they are looking for profitability and they won't achieve it with a 200% tax on top of large energy bills and hardware expenses.
The timing can make a big difference though, as they might be happy to burn through money to get better adoption, especially if that pumps up their stock price. Also, if the executive making the decision is looking to jump ship, then they might not care about the long term impact.
at some point the additional tax revenue outweighs the downsides
I disagree as you can't eat or drink tax revenue.
Datacenters don't meaningfully impact food production.
This is just an aesthetic objection, nothing more.
you can eat food and drink water, though. use the tax revenue to directly support food and water via investing it in agriculture, food imports, water sanitation, etc.
Tax revenue doesn't outweigh clean water. Without clean water, we die.
the water thing is exaggerated when it comes to data centers.
but playing along with it: you just raise the % tax increase until it covers the cost of importing/cleaning the water or whatever other negative externality the data center causes.
the concept is similar to "fuck you" pricing of construction contracts. you place a bid that is super high (i.e. the 200% tax), and you're happy either way. if you land the job (data center is built), you make insane profits (tax) to be used elsewhere (cleaning water, green initiatives, or whatever). if you don't land the job (data center not built), that is great too, you didn't really want it anyways.
one thing is absolutely certain, though: humans will never build so many data centers that we run out of water. water scarcity will be from other causes.
Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.
LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.
There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.
Is it inherent to the architecture of LLMs/GenAI or rather is it because VCs fund what they can capture and others can't fund?
Agricultural areas? After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades, now Europe wants to become an autarky?
1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.
> 1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
As if it was a charity lmao, this is a top priority, before defense even, food security will become more and more of a problem, that and water
But EU does not pay farmers to farm efficiently and produce more food but does it to keep inefficient ones going so not much to do with actual food security.
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
> the main purpose of the thing
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
The EU is an agricultural union with a bit of other stuff sprinkled on top.
That was true 30 years ago, but is less true today. That doesn't mean farmers don't have inordinate power, but that's the same in most developed countries with rural areas (see also, the USA, Japan, etc).
This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.
> After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades
What? A quarter of EU expenditure is spent on agricultural subsidies, i.e. directly paying people to be farmers.
I imagine they're thinking of late 19th century. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As we all know, agricultural areas use much less resources and are generally great for the environment. (Yes, this is sarcasm. See also [0], which is US-centric but still relevant.)
[0]: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm all for NOT building datacenters in nature that's worth preserving, or near residential areas where other areas would be fine. Farmland, don't care.
Yeah, but they do produce food which data centers do not. This is an odd argument to make.
Only a very small fraction of farmland produces food we directly eat. The OP's linked article has a great illustration of that.
We already produce far more food than we need. The amount of land in the US used for corn ethanol production alone is the size of a medium European country.
Data centers are not displacing food. That argument is disingenuous. Even in Italy agricultural land goes unused because of low demand.
that's the argument an AI will make to preserve itself.
Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't.
They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.
> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive
This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.
The problem is feed lots.
There's no problem the more conventional practice of letting animals graze the majority of the year. If we didn't use those fields to feed and eat the animals, the grass would turn into CO2 and methane anyway. Or turn into boring forests.
Not everything has to be optimal. That thinking leads to Thanos' snap. People generally enjoy meat. They also enjoy the landscape farmers created.
Please at least pretend to read the article before posting something like that.
The US has ~97 people / mi² vs ~519 people / mi² in Italy so the article is less relevant than you think
Tens of millions of acres of agricultural land goes to things like production of corn ethanol. It is disingenuous to pretend we need this land to feed anybody.
We have vastly more arable land than is needed to keep people from starving, even when used inefficiently to produce things like cattle feed.
Maybe in the US, but farmland is quite scarce in Lombardy.
Just because it is scarce doesn't mean it is productive.
I have friends with farms and agricultural businesses in Italy. A lot of agricultural land is no longer cultivated by the families that own it because market prices are well below the cost of production in Italy.
One can say that food can be produced elsewhere, but also data centers might be a critical component of future society if we don't solve birth rates. Also, fewer births mean less food required.
The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.
But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.
I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.
Normal datacentres, sure, but these services are already running from the existing datacentres.
These purpose built DCs in the recent AI craze doesn't. A handful of security guys, handful of technicians and that's pretty much it
they said "that many jobs" not "no jobs".
compared to something like a car factory, data centers do not provide that many jobs.
(and the jobs are of significantly different nature)
Directly, sure. Indirectly, they have created many millions of jobs. Tens of millions at the very lowest. There are nearly 30 million web developers alone.
the problem is that many of those jobs often aren't in the locale. by necessity, car factory workers work, live, spend money, and pay taxes in the same general area as the car factory. that does not hold true for web developers (which may be in entirely different countries).
Many of which are bullshit jobs... Just because something generates a job, it doesn't make that something automatically a good thing with a net impact on our world and society. There are many more boxes to tick.
As long as we don't see the damaged areas around data centers than all is fine, right?
Where have I heard this before?
What damage do you have in mind? I live next to a big cluster of data centers, second biggest in Europe, and I haven't seen anything like "damage" from them.
What damage?