This could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology.
China has something of the same problem. The cheap power sources are in the northwest, and the big loads are in the southeast. So China has long million-volt UHV DC lines.
So, you move into a new flat. In the living room, there's five sockets on the west side, but only one on the east side, and that's planned for a lamp already.
Does it make more sense to
a) put up your TV and gaming console on the east side, and have an electrician run another power line across the room (they can install five plugs there too so you can keep the lamp and even charge your phone, which is nice), or
b) simply put up your TV and console on the west side?
I know parent didn't say anything about DCs, but this is a thread about power lines to data centres. Before you go out of your way to span expensive power lines all across the country to get the power where the consumers are, it's a lot smarter to move consumers where the power already is.
Sure, we'll just pack up our glass and steel foundries and oil refineries and move them across the country. Should be cheap and easy.
The world is a lot more complicated than "datacenter bad". I don't think datacenters are a good justification for HVDC transmission. HVDC transmission justifies itself because even if you could magically transport the biggest consumers to where the power is generated, we still need to transport power all the way across the country. HVDC is the most efficient way to do that bar none.
The reality of the situation is that our power grid is a century out of date and needs an overhaul for the realities of renewable energy. Not installing HVDC transmission lines is simply not an option if we want the whole country to stop using local coal and gas plants.
I like your analogy so I will use it in my counter argument. I even have a personal example!
In my last place, there were no ethernet ports, and there was no shot that my landlord would install any. Coaxial wasn’t correctly wired up either. So my two options were to either move my setup into the kitchen, or to run an Ethernet cord up into my room.
I chose the second option to not monopolize the dining room table. It wasn’t pretty but my roommates were happier with some painters tape on the walls than my computer being in the kitchen.
I think a similar thing can be said for people who live in remote areas, it is about compromise. In this example it’s low internet speeds, traveling to get groceries if you live in a food desert, or paying more for utilities.
People prefer what they prefer. And if their preferences are worth their cost of the compromises, then they are going to go with their preferences.
It’s unreasonable to expect someone to move / abandon their preferences because they may not make sense to others on paper.
What an absolutely unnecessary analogy. The question is obviously more asking what is preferable about putting data centres in places where there is high competition with the population for power.
Latency for interaction with AI? For something the user use browsers and electron apps. A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
> A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but as someone who manages infrastructure which is literally on the opposite side of the planet (from me) RTT is long enough to be objectively horrible for anything interactive like typing over SSH. At least 250ms capital to capital for Europe to Oceania + last mile latency makes 300ms a more realistic minimum + actual processing time + client side rendering and it really starts to feel like a half second from the full human perspective... Under ideal conditions.
Are they more playable if the server is in the nearest coast compared to the middle of the US? If you're in the US, for something like AI inference, then RTT within the continental US is probably reasonable. Similar is likely true through most of Europe.
It's not just AI. Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user, alone because the data volume would completely overwhelm backhaul links... that's why Youtube, Netflix and a lot of CDNs all have colo facilities close to major population centers and their regionally dominant ISPs.
It can be significantly cheaper to pay colo fees at an ISP' s data center than to pay interconnection fees for bulk transfers.
> Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user
That's a straw man for this discussion. Yes, there will be a need to place some DCs close to users, but most of them could be located closer to energy production, attached to a backbone network, and the vast majority of customers would not suffer any degradation of service from it.
Either the data center is in the wind belt and you run fiber to the people, or the data center is near the people and you run power to the source. Either way you have to do some kind of cable run, and that means land.
Does that actually make any sense when there is also plenty of wind across the ocean, which is >1000 miles closer to the coastal cities where people live?
Offshore wind power costs ~3 times more per MWh than on land. You can still do it if you're really low on space, but if you have tons of empty space anyway, it may very well be cheaper to simply build longer power lines.
The main advantage of offshore power is the reliability of the wind. For example, on the North Sea the wind blows strong enough for power generation 80% of the time.
Misleading title: they are using eminent domain to seize land for power lines to data centers. (emphasis mine)
This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.
To be even more nuanced, the land is not typically taken entirely. The more typical solution is an easement with compensation for the land owner to cover the reduction in utility.
Transmission lines are pretty harmless when considering things that could be built instead. Zero emissions, silent, no illumination, etc.
I was looking at buying a house with big transmission lines crossing over the property. It was a misty not-quite-raining day when I went to look at it, and you could hear the lines crackling and humming the whole time you were outside. I figured I’d have to give up ham radio if I moved there, ha.
There's a high-voltage line that crosses over a park (with soccer fields etc...) near me, and you can hear it crackling whenever you're there. I'm sure it's a noisy radio environment.
Over time as some dirty coats the insulators, and on high humidity days some kind of crackling is clearly audible in a fairly wide radio close to the towers.
Also, transmission towers are usually the best lightning rods for miles in a given location, and it is fucking unsettling to live close to them during storms. Not to mention they are an eye sore.
These are not silent nor zero emission. These do emit large electromagnetic fields that interfere with some electronics. There are also some studies that show higher risk of childhood leukemia and potentially negative affects to sensitive groups such as people with neurodiverse conditions. They also tend to hum and crackle. At times you will have helicopters doing line work too.
> potentially negative affects to sensitive groups such as people with neurodiverse conditions
People with neurodiverse conditions are not sensitive to power lines. Hard to believe we’re seeing this type of claim on Hacker News.
Modern high voltage DC transmission lines also don’t have 60Hz emissions because they’re DC.
Anyway, the land where these transmission lines are built usually isn’t running through high population density areas. They’re not slapping a HV transmission line right in the middle of a residential corridor if they can avoid it. It’s going through farm land and empty space if at all possible. It’s a hundred times easier to build the towers in those locations instead of near population centers.
you've never walked under a high voltage power line?
even driving a car under it you can hear the radio being weird. i assume it can make life miserable for a ham radio enthusiast.
also, walking beneath one, you can hear the crackle, which is why nobody places a power line above homes.
as for them causing leukemia i'd not consider that realistic
My home is like 1500 ft from HV lines. According to OSM, they are 115kV. Some of my neighbors are even closer. These things are totally built near homes.
Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.
Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.
The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.
Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.
The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.
These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.
We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.
I am going to say ok maybe possible but I look at how many transmission lines criss cross places like Dallas. Would there not be enough data to have already proved that thesis?
I remember the original issue with these is they were spraying some kind agent orange like chemical to keep growth down under the lines and people were getting cancer from it 50 years ago.
I've got overhead transmission lines in my back yard right now. It's really not a big deal. I've got a garden and a small shed that are directly underneath the lines. I have no perceptible loss in utility. Every now and then, someone will visit my property but I don't have to interact with them.
The nature of the easement can make a big difference. Oftentimes the power lines will be colocated with gas pipelines which tend to impose stricter requirements on land owners. It's a lot easier to do things like excavate when you can see what you aren't supposed to hit.
Is the nuance you're contributing here substantiated in the proposals being discussed in the article?
Transmission lines emit EMF which seem pretty harmless unless you're a pollinator or migratory bird. Maybe the home owners are just making a fuss so they can get a better payout to improve the amenities in the bunkers that comprise their subterranean community of concrete beneath the barren badlands of the over-world. At the very least, they should ensure respirators and gaussmeters for able-bodied coal miner minors.
The buzzing is pretty obvious when it is rainy or misty. I passed a power line during my high school bike commute, it never failed to amuse me. I wouldn't call it "loud" though: noticeable, but the average traffic noise is far worse.
The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
> The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
This seems like the thing where people use the phrase "there is no evidence of" to imply that something has been disproven when what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
Basically I just thought the leukaemia claim is quite an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence if you’re trying to convince a sensible person of your claim.
I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
I’m fully aware though that before we knew about nuclear radiation people would have had similar thoughts about some random rare earth metal causing cancer if you’re not even touching it. So point is, I’ll wait for the proof before I’m convinced, or attempt to convince others.
I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars. I might be speaking from personal experience.
> I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.
> I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars.
Eating junk food has the countervailing benefit that they like the taste. There is very little personal benefit to having a high voltage line in your yard, and people respond especially poorly to things that have a personal risk with no personal benefit.
"Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food."
The actual change to look at isn't really the heating, but rather that RF has been known to increase glucose metabolism in affected cells. My own theory is that if that is true, you're essentially increasing cell aging and oxidative stress with the increased metabolism. Who knows if it's true. The effect seems small and the exposures need to be longterm.
Surely power lines running directly across a residential property represent a long-term exposure.
(I personally doubt there is a significant risk, but if there is, these powerline easements would be quite risky to the residents in terms of ongoing/continuous exposure.)
> what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the leukemia claim just as likely.
There's a lot of people saying they aren't harmless but there's no credible evidence they aren't harmless. It's like flat earth, you know, there's no evidence the earth is flat.
There have been some pretty egregious misuses of eminent domain in the past, but using it for infrastructure is pretty much the quintessential justification. That's basically the only reason to have eminent domain at all. Arguing against it when that's how it's being used is, in my opinion, essentially arguing against the very concept of eminent domain. Which one can totally choose to do! But they should be up front about it, if that's what's going on.
As for the title, I would go further than you do. This is not a misleading title. It is a lying title. I'm usually a pretty big believer in Scott Alexander's Bounded Distrust [0] concept for the media where they very rarely actually, technically lie. This title (although not the article itself), in my opinion crosses that line.
We run power lines to everything else: houses, offices, commercial buildings, factories, and so on. Any particular reasons we should have a special exception where we don't run them to data centers?
Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgrades.
Agreed. Since most land is already owned by private individuals do we freeze everything as is and do no further changes [1]?
The last house I lived in had an easement along the back property line. I built my fence on the easement knowing full well they would tear it up if they needed to access anything. I live in a denser town now where the power comes from the street to my house, wraps around my house, then lines to the next building over. I guess I should tell those people in the other building to figure out a different way to get power.
[1] Also feels a bit like the arguments against wind power.
But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is overwhelming public benefit. I can't just say I want to build a factory and force access and utilities across my neighbours without their permission or an extraordinary process to prove that I'm going to provide massive local benefit (or national security).
If my factory wants to compete on an already contested resource (water, power), I should have to go further to show that I'm going to be a net benefit in my area.
As things stand, datacentres provide very an extraordinarily low employment density. They don't produce food. They consume an extraordinary amount of energy making it more expensive. And they money they generate concentrates wealth to billionaires. If you want your powerlines prove you're going to be beneficial. Start with a solar+batterty farm. You can surge from the network, and sell on slow days. Guarantee free power and network for locals. Integrate heat pumps to heat local homes in winter.
I've wandered off the topic of forcing permanent access to others land into broader planning, but it's all related.
>But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is
Ever since Kelo v New London we do.
> overwhelming public benefit.
This is just an appeal to authority that is predicated on the broad willful ignorance that the mean reader here will have toward how this particular sausage is made.
Read the proceedings. Half the time it's bullshit like "gravel pit or office park development wants an easement through undeveloped/agricultural/industrial parcels XYZ to build a road because that means they can exit closer to the highway which saves a bunch of money. They'd pay the land owner because at the end of the day it's money either way, they just think they can convince the state to stomp the land owner cheaper than they can pay off the land owner.
A blank cheque on corpo infrastructure just means that billionaires win and everyone else loses. At that point, just paint "Peasant Slave" on your forehead if you don't have a multi-million lobbying group at the state and federal level.
"All your base are belong to us" => Billionaires of USA
When that happens rename the nation to Corporate States of America as well.
But what if I want to live in a country with a growing economy and improving infrastructure? Forbidding all development does hurt corporations and the wealthy, but just in the sense that it hurts everyone, including them.
If we do want to soak the rich, can we do it in a progressive, targeted way (such as taxes) and not in a NIMBY way where we just say no one can build or improve anything?
If they pay enough, why not? What is public use infrastructure in your opinion? Any difference than building more houses (like a dense apartment complex) and extend the grid there? That's still private corp infrastructure.
There's a difference between "The state will seize your property" and "You may sell your property to the corporation at a rate you choose, and if you don't want to then they'll have to find some other land to use". In either case, development does happen, but the primary beneficiaries of the development (the owners of the data center) would have to pay the people who's land they're using (or taking!) instead of lobbying the government to just take it.
I think that unwitting land owners should not be subsidizing the AI grifters...
ALL High-tech Infra that leverages "eminent domain" SHOULD be held in the name of the nation state for public good not by the billionaire or his corpo. All these private data centers that leverage eminent domain to grab land should be property of the state and only temporarily leased to the corpo.
> Arguing against it when that's how it's being used is, in my opinion, essentially arguing against the very concept of eminent domain
You're giving a blank check to use it as long as it's infrastructure, and as any simple rule, it's prone to get abused way beyond it's primary goal. IMHO the issue is nuance and balance, we should accept that whether it's applicable is an "it depends" matter.
Keeping it too simple and black and white means companies can now strategically place data centers and get the local government to seize all the land leading to it, and vice versa, local govs can nudge companies to target specific places to seize wherever they want. Especially as the plans aren't required to come to fruition.
(Submitted title was "Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers" but we've since changed the URL - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975572)
Actually, strictly speaking, it's /more/ debatable. Using eminent domain to seize land for the data centre itself gets a much more generally negative reaction, while seizing it for the purpose of infrastructure to supply said datacentre - and therefore, at least arguably, alleviate strain on the infrastructure used by everyone else - has more nuance and more room for debate.
Data centers are a fixed load with on-site backup generators that can be used to shed load when the grid is stressed. Grids actually like that sort of thing. It lets them use more cheap renewables.
Humans are dumb. Near my current city folks are debating a solar farm going up. Far enough out of the way that it has zero impact to anything he city, middle on nowhere farmland. The math was something silly, for farm use it would generate $15,000 or solar farm $1,000,000. I am probably embellishing the number from memory but it was staggering. Folks are still trying to fight it. It’s frustrating.
Farmers don’t like lines because you have to allow for an access road to it and it does not pay anywhere as well as say a cell tower.
It's more misleading than that. The power line that "may" "primarily"[1] serve a private data center has started construction "after nearly 20 years of planning, permitting and lawsuits"[2].
Per usual, NIMBYs continually move the goal posts and rely heavily on rhetoric to oppose a project. Data center opposition is providing them with great PR fodder, but they would have opposed these projects regardless. This is why infrastructure is so incredibly expensive in this country.
Are you under the impression people are not compensated by eminent domain?
In fact, a huge portion of the sentimental press stores over eminent domain are attempts by homeowners not to cancel the project, but to increase the payouts. Often the homeowners would be quite sad to see the project cancelled, they just want to milk the settlement via litigation.
I am under the impression that they are not compensated correctly when their land is taken.
I own the land that I do because I value it more than any other buyer/current bidder. (If that weren’t true, I’d sell it to the higher bidder.)
If, instead of bidding an attractive price for my land like an ordinary buyer, you win a court case or political process that says you can force me to sell my land at a “fair market value”, that previous point establishes that I’m being forced to take a loss, as I am being forced to accept a price lower than my reservation price.
At the same time, eminent domain must exist in order to let continuous projects like power lines and highways be built. I just think that 150% or 200% of what is currently called “fair market value” is a better reference price than 100% of it.
The taking of land against the owner’s will should come at a premium, but that premium should be capped rather than unbounded.
The problem with not having eminent domain is that without it, for any project of sufficient size you'll end up with ~100+ land owners who each individually have veto power over the entire project. If 99 of them freely agree to sell, but 1 is really stubborn and refuses to sell at any price, the project is dead.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma problem. Maybe it's not a big deal paying one stubborn guy 100x fair market value for his property to allow the project to continue. But if enough people think they can get 100x what their property is worth if they just hold out a bit longer, that also kills the project.
Eminent domain solves all this by making it so the project only has to to clear a few bars the government has set for it, rather than the many bars ~100 individual landowners set for it. But in the process it also erodes property rights and kills the built-in protections the free market has to ensure such transactions are fair.
A 1.5x or 2x multiplier on the fair market value would help with that a lot and help ensure eminent domain is only used in cases where it's strictly needed.
Or alternately, I sort of like the idea of letting the landowners elect someone to represent them in negotiations with the project developer, and then having a chance to vote yes/no on the final cash offer. Then the final price would still be set by a market of sorts, but there'd be no prisoner's dilemma or individual spoilers. Not 100% sure if that would work better or not though; it is a bit more complicated and there are still some issues with it.
Condemnation proceedings are the exception. Most of the time, the entity taking the land under the threat of eminent domain offers substantially above FMV, if only because condemnation proceedings cost money and, more importantly, time.
Some states do require above FMV for condemnation, e.g. 120%. After Kelo in the early 2000s, almost every state passed significant eminent domain reform.
Throw around NIMBY as a pejorative until you're blue in the face. Landowning residents have a civic duty to exercise their interests to prevent the remote monied and powerful from packaging their speculative investments as valuable infrastructure when the profits are privatized and the losses are socialized. The gambling addicts aren't going to spend a single day in prison when neglected overbuilt "infrastructure" directly causes mass casualties or pervert the shape of communities spanning generations.
Dunno why you think it's obvious that I should be able to have the state seize your house for my own personal infrastructure just because I demand I chew through so much electricity that the local infrastructure can't support my demands.
Do you have the same objection if it for a housing project, built by a private corp?
That's a practice that exists everywhere. This is an article about a case of expropriation in the Netherlands. The government frequently uses expropriation ("onteigening") to forcibly remove old, small wind turbines owned by private farmers to make room for massive, industrial-scale wind farms. In Dutch, so you'll need to swith on English translation:
i definitely have internal debates on the idea of eminent domain and the nuances of wether i think its ok or not.
that said, i think i lean to it’s absolutely not ok to use eminent domain when the receivers of the benefits of the taken property are primarily one private industry and its owners.
i’d probably more often be ok with it if the benefits were mostly limited to being widely distributed to the people of that locality/region.
even then i go back and forth but i know for sure that plays a major part in how i see it.
I feel the same. When those large datacenter projects were being considered, the necessity for building new power lines should have been included in the ask. Instead they built the centers, then "notice" the system is straining and stick the public with the bill and local communities with the consequences. Classic "privatize profits and socialize risks".
Every consumer of electricity had to have power lines installed to their building in order to get electricity. They all then pay in proportion to how much electricity they use. The electric bill of a data center is large. It already includes the cost of building and maintaining power lines and generating power and everything else, because they all do, since that's what electric bills pay for.
In general the problem is the power company, having received a large new customer and therefore a lot of new revenue, who wants to stuff it in their pocket instead of using it to upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
That seems perfectly reasonable. Eminent domain for power lines is about the most reasonable use of the tool. This kind of thing is what it’s there for.
Notice how when it comes to the interests of Capital, suddenly regulations or NIMBYs are rendered powerless. Building homes and infrastructure? Impossible. Building datacenters that will be obsolete in 4 years and abandoned just to fuel a speculation bubble? Yessir! Immediately, sir!
The current system we live in is unsustainable and on the verge of breaking. We're headed towards something far worse than 1929, and there's nothing we can do to stop this train.
I started to believe this when snapshot had their IPO value at something like 5 Exxons or 24 General Motors, but was primed for this belief working on energy and carbon credit derivative markets during the early 2010s, an experience that made me start believing it is all a fucking casino.
You should care and do more. It's honestly sad to look at the destruction of your community and do nothing about it. There are plenty of groups that could use your help, go help them. Be part of something instead of an observer.
Are these AI-driven data centers actually getting built? I was reading about Kevin O’Leary’s initial proposal for his Utah data center and it’s just preposterous, it’s inconceivable anyone needs that much compute at any realistic demand level. The ask is so massively large that even the scaled down version is just absurd.
We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exposed as a glorified PR stunt without any substance. [1]
I happen to know some people who work for a company that helps build data centers. Business is booming for them, lots of projects all over the country (USA). So just to answer the straight up question of if they're actually getting built, yes they certainly are.
I’m not too deep into the matter but don’t they all have to wait in the interconnection queue first anyway? My understanding is that that alone will take some years
Kevin O’Leary is a grifter and he should be completely ignored. He literally got rich conning HP (though they were stupid for going ahead with it).
That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.
I thought he got rich conning Mattel to buy The Learning Company in 1999? They paid $3.5B for it and gave it away a year later. Then there was a lawsuit with a $100M+ settlement.
Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.
Regardless of the computational needs to facilitate mass surveilance, there are inescapable storage needs precipitated by surveilance. Governments want to retain data because its value in the future is unknown in the present. This is the entire premise behind the Harvest Now Decrypt Later[0] principle that fuels much of the previous surveilance actions taken by governments. But HNDL is speculative; it either hedges on the bet that computational breakthroughs will weaken encryption methods to the point where brute force attempts at decryption are not financially feasible for most actors but still physically possible, or rely on a backdoor in an encryption algorithm to decrypt data that is valuable. There has been much speculation about this feasibility and value RE: quantum computation and also the design of encryption algorithms from the ground up (see things like the Clipper Chip and RSA's relationship with the NSA).
With things like video, photo, audio, and liturgical surveilance, the data is largely out in the open (or simply purchased from their hosting platforms, leading to social media and adtech companies like Facebook and Google being defense contractors by nature) and does not need to be decrypted (in most cases) - rather, it needs to be correlated. This is a great task for machine learning because that's what the field has largely been engineered to do for the last 60 years, but it relies so, so, so heavily on having data to both train on and use in its practice. Storage of all data is the perfect end-goal of a surveilance state. Storage requires data centers. Data centers of this calibre are effectively black sites in that they are nigh impenetrable in both practical and legal senses, and I'd wager many data centers host actual digital black sites simply due to their ubiquity as means of doing so coupled with the necessity of the hardware and facilities they provide that are needed for doing so.
Theres really nothing that will ever be publicly available that would say "this data center has a hundred thousand SOTA GPUs in it that are doing gait recognition on every camera in every airport in the world in real time" versus "this data center is a bunch of tape machines that store everything ever recorded from every facsimilie of Room 641A[1]".
Harvest Now Decrypt Later principle holds very well for intelligence work, the harvested information could be useful for very long time.
You can see this in the long time intervals specified for Declassification of classified documents.
"Executive Order 13526 establishes the mechanisms for most declassifications, within the laws passed by Congress.[1] The originating agency assigns a declassification date, by default 25 years. After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission."
"Decrypt Later" should generalized to "Use Later", many recordings are useful without decryption, just from the metadata you can establish who, when communicated. Identification of relations between persons, building of social graphs, is the basic of intelligence work. Much of this relationship analysis can be done just from metadata.
One example of such analysis is the NSA Co-Travel Analytics
"CO-TRAVELER does not simply collect location information. It creates a portrait of travel times and people who crossed paths, revealing our physical interactions and relationships. The cell site information goes beyond email and phone calls and ordinary telephony data, allowing the U.S. government to know who we are with in-person and where. This is information that would be impossible to collect using traditional law enforcement methods. "
Well put; the scope of usefulness of surveilance data lies well beyond what is in that data itself, but how it relates to other data. You don't necessarily need to decrypt data to distill value from it, as its metadata (location, datetime, medium, etc.) is also (and potentially more) useful when related with other metadata. Storing this data is also a monumental task, given the fidelity of records that many consumer devices create, store, and upload.
Video-processing AI can be very flexible in its demands.
Even if a camera supports 4k 60fps video, the 'edge AI' can downscale the input to 224x224 2fps and use a small network.
Often the 'edge AI' just needs to detect humans/cars/pets and trigger saving some footage to an SD card/turning on a light. It's not the end of the world if it misses some things or raises false alarms sometimes.
And if you buy a Reolink on Amazon expecting it to be able to recognise a face from 20 yards away, you'll be disappointed.
IMO you highly underestimate the amount of processing and storage video surveillance requires. There is just no good way to determine if you took that pen or made the newly illegal handgesture towards the wrong person 12 years ago unless you have enough storage to keep all the footage around and the processing power to search through it or prepare it for new types of queries in reasonable time.
Also, have you considered AI being necessary to fill in for missing surveillance footage if the cameras are failing (the ruling class)? E.g. the whole Epstein (PR) disaster could have been avoided if the cameras could have been kept running and the footage post-processed in time.
Cosmic rays, launch costs, relative impossibility of maintenance, difficulty of heat dispersal, added latency, interconnect interference, no way to recycle when decommissioning.
I am all for Communism and giving more priority to projects that help all society. But this is not it.
It would help if the power grid was public property, thou.
It would help if the power grid was build so the majority of citizens profit.
It would help if the power grid was build for someone else than big tech.
Meanwhile building railroads is impossible. Could we convince AI companies to build their datacenters on trains? USA would have in a few years the largest train network in the world.
This could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology.
China has something of the same problem. The cheap power sources are in the northwest, and the big loads are in the southeast. So China has long million-volt UHV DC lines.
And why not build data centers where the energy is?
Parent comment didn’t say anything about data centers.
Getting power from the areas with high renewable energy density over to the population centers is a good goal to have.
So, you move into a new flat. In the living room, there's five sockets on the west side, but only one on the east side, and that's planned for a lamp already.
Does it make more sense to
I know parent didn't say anything about DCs, but this is a thread about power lines to data centres. Before you go out of your way to span expensive power lines all across the country to get the power where the consumers are, it's a lot smarter to move consumers where the power already is.Sure, we'll just pack up our glass and steel foundries and oil refineries and move them across the country. Should be cheap and easy.
The world is a lot more complicated than "datacenter bad". I don't think datacenters are a good justification for HVDC transmission. HVDC transmission justifies itself because even if you could magically transport the biggest consumers to where the power is generated, we still need to transport power all the way across the country. HVDC is the most efficient way to do that bar none.
The reality of the situation is that our power grid is a century out of date and needs an overhaul for the realities of renewable energy. Not installing HVDC transmission lines is simply not an option if we want the whole country to stop using local coal and gas plants.
I like your analogy so I will use it in my counter argument. I even have a personal example!
In my last place, there were no ethernet ports, and there was no shot that my landlord would install any. Coaxial wasn’t correctly wired up either. So my two options were to either move my setup into the kitchen, or to run an Ethernet cord up into my room.
I chose the second option to not monopolize the dining room table. It wasn’t pretty but my roommates were happier with some painters tape on the walls than my computer being in the kitchen.
I think a similar thing can be said for people who live in remote areas, it is about compromise. In this example it’s low internet speeds, traveling to get groceries if you live in a food desert, or paying more for utilities.
People prefer what they prefer. And if their preferences are worth their cost of the compromises, then they are going to go with their preferences.
It’s unreasonable to expect someone to move / abandon their preferences because they may not make sense to others on paper.
What an absolutely unnecessary analogy. The question is obviously more asking what is preferable about putting data centres in places where there is high competition with the population for power.
Latency.
Latency for interaction with AI? For something the user use browsers and electron apps. A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
> A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but as someone who manages infrastructure which is literally on the opposite side of the planet (from me) RTT is long enough to be objectively horrible for anything interactive like typing over SSH. At least 250ms capital to capital for Europe to Oceania + last mile latency makes 300ms a more realistic minimum + actual processing time + client side rendering and it really starts to feel like a half second from the full human perspective... Under ideal conditions.
Increasing latency can also reduce TCP throughput ceiling, increase in-flight concurrency, and increase server memory consumption.
Dafuck? No way lol
Playing from eu on us servers is not playable
>A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
Are they more playable if the server is in the nearest coast compared to the middle of the US? If you're in the US, for something like AI inference, then RTT within the continental US is probably reasonable. Similar is likely true through most of Europe.
I don't think that gaming is the focus of the DC discussed in this article. I don't think gaming will ever require a massive buildup as AI nowadays.
> Latency for interaction with AI?
It's not just AI. Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user, alone because the data volume would completely overwhelm backhaul links... that's why Youtube, Netflix and a lot of CDNs all have colo facilities close to major population centers and their regionally dominant ISPs.
It can be significantly cheaper to pay colo fees at an ISP' s data center than to pay interconnection fees for bulk transfers.
> Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user
That's a straw man for this discussion. Yes, there will be a need to place some DCs close to users, but most of them could be located closer to energy production, attached to a backbone network, and the vast majority of customers would not suffer any degradation of service from it.
Whats the relevance of fibre optic latency to electric lines?
Either the data center is in the wind belt and you run fiber to the people, or the data center is near the people and you run power to the source. Either way you have to do some kind of cable run, and that means land.
fiber is a lot easier to run under houses than hvdc.
Does it matter for training?
I'd assume that site selection managers understand how recommending "only useful for training" locations might impact their careers.
Not all loads require low latency to end users.
Doesn’t matter for training or most AI use cases. We are talking tens of ms latency here.
I’m gonna guess availability of employees may matter more.
Once built, the DC has like, ten employees. Nine security guards and a part-time on-site technician.
Does that actually make any sense when there is also plenty of wind across the ocean, which is >1000 miles closer to the coastal cities where people live?
Offshore wind power costs ~3 times more per MWh than on land. You can still do it if you're really low on space, but if you have tons of empty space anyway, it may very well be cheaper to simply build longer power lines.
The main advantage of offshore power is the reliability of the wind. For example, on the North Sea the wind blows strong enough for power generation 80% of the time.
The East coast of the US has similar trade winds.
Plus the current admin is extremely hostile towards wind power projects.
Tends to have a lot of unfortunate pushback from the well-connected people who like to live on coastlines.
Why DC lines? AC is by far the better technology for distance transmission.
I assume Chinese engineers know how to build power lines, so maybe it is better in this case?
That used to be the idea but high voltage DC lines are now more efficient than ac
Misleading title: they are using eminent domain to seize land for power lines to data centers. (emphasis mine)
This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.
To be even more nuanced, the land is not typically taken entirely. The more typical solution is an easement with compensation for the land owner to cover the reduction in utility.
Transmission lines are pretty harmless when considering things that could be built instead. Zero emissions, silent, no illumination, etc.
> Zero emissions, silent, no illumination, etc.
Mostly silent. High voltage transmission lines may have a low-frequency hum. You have to stand directly under them to hear it though.
I was looking at buying a house with big transmission lines crossing over the property. It was a misty not-quite-raining day when I went to look at it, and you could hear the lines crackling and humming the whole time you were outside. I figured I’d have to give up ham radio if I moved there, ha.
Which you would, if they were crossing over your house. Probably not worse than many other mundane things though.
There's a high-voltage line that crosses over a park (with soccer fields etc...) near me, and you can hear it crackling whenever you're there. I'm sure it's a noisy radio environment.
Over time as some dirty coats the insulators, and on high humidity days some kind of crackling is clearly audible in a fairly wide radio close to the towers.
Also, transmission towers are usually the best lightning rods for miles in a given location, and it is fucking unsettling to live close to them during storms. Not to mention they are an eye sore.
These are not silent nor zero emission. These do emit large electromagnetic fields that interfere with some electronics. There are also some studies that show higher risk of childhood leukemia and potentially negative affects to sensitive groups such as people with neurodiverse conditions. They also tend to hum and crackle. At times you will have helicopters doing line work too.
> potentially negative affects to sensitive groups such as people with neurodiverse conditions
People with neurodiverse conditions are not sensitive to power lines. Hard to believe we’re seeing this type of claim on Hacker News.
Modern high voltage DC transmission lines also don’t have 60Hz emissions because they’re DC.
Anyway, the land where these transmission lines are built usually isn’t running through high population density areas. They’re not slapping a HV transmission line right in the middle of a residential corridor if they can avoid it. It’s going through farm land and empty space if at all possible. It’s a hundred times easier to build the towers in those locations instead of near population centers.
Having zero knowledge about these studies I have high credence they are baloney.
you've never walked under a high voltage power line? even driving a car under it you can hear the radio being weird. i assume it can make life miserable for a ham radio enthusiast. also, walking beneath one, you can hear the crackle, which is why nobody places a power line above homes.
as for them causing leukemia i'd not consider that realistic
My home is like 1500 ft from HV lines. According to OSM, they are 115kV. Some of my neighbors are even closer. These things are totally built near homes.
Well maybe you should have a bit more hubris is in the face of science. You can power a lightbulb just by standing under certain high-voltage lines.
Which ones - the ones that show an association or the ones that don't?
Skeptic here.
Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.
Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.
The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.
Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.
The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.
These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.
We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.
I am going to say ok maybe possible but I look at how many transmission lines criss cross places like Dallas. Would there not be enough data to have already proved that thesis?
I remember the original issue with these is they were spraying some kind agent orange like chemical to keep growth down under the lines and people were getting cancer from it 50 years ago.
Pretty harmless? That's easy to say until it's your land and view that now has pylons and restrictions dumped on it.
I've got overhead transmission lines in my back yard right now. It's really not a big deal. I've got a garden and a small shed that are directly underneath the lines. I have no perceptible loss in utility. Every now and then, someone will visit my property but I don't have to interact with them.
The nature of the easement can make a big difference. Oftentimes the power lines will be colocated with gas pipelines which tend to impose stricter requirements on land owners. It's a lot easier to do things like excavate when you can see what you aren't supposed to hit.
Ditto. They come and trim my trees for me and pay me £300 a year for the privilege. I really don’t mind, barely even notice the lines are there.
My parents got $7000 when the state wanted to shave their hill for better visibility around a road curve. They lost a pretty cherry tree.
What's the voltage of power lines to datacenters?
Lots. They are trying to build Gigawatt transmission to these
Is the nuance you're contributing here substantiated in the proposals being discussed in the article?
Transmission lines emit EMF which seem pretty harmless unless you're a pollinator or migratory bird. Maybe the home owners are just making a fuss so they can get a better payout to improve the amenities in the bunkers that comprise their subterranean community of concrete beneath the barren badlands of the over-world. At the very least, they should ensure respirators and gaussmeters for able-bodied coal miner minors.
They buzz loudly and increase leukemia.
Sources?
The buzzing is pretty obvious when it is rainy or misty. I passed a power line during my high school bike commute, it never failed to amuse me. I wouldn't call it "loud" though: noticeable, but the average traffic noise is far worse.
The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
> The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
This seems like the thing where people use the phrase "there is no evidence of" to imply that something has been disproven when what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
Basically I just thought the leukaemia claim is quite an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence if you’re trying to convince a sensible person of your claim.
I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
I’m fully aware though that before we knew about nuclear radiation people would have had similar thoughts about some random rare earth metal causing cancer if you’re not even touching it. So point is, I’ll wait for the proof before I’m convinced, or attempt to convince others.
I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars. I might be speaking from personal experience.
> I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.
> I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars.
Eating junk food has the countervailing benefit that they like the taste. There is very little personal benefit to having a high voltage line in your yard, and people respond especially poorly to things that have a personal risk with no personal benefit.
"Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food."
The actual change to look at isn't really the heating, but rather that RF has been known to increase glucose metabolism in affected cells. My own theory is that if that is true, you're essentially increasing cell aging and oxidative stress with the increased metabolism. Who knows if it's true. The effect seems small and the exposures need to be longterm.
Surely power lines running directly across a residential property represent a long-term exposure.
(I personally doubt there is a significant risk, but if there is, these powerline easements would be quite risky to the residents in terms of ongoing/continuous exposure.)
> Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.
At 60 hz? I think that’s a bit low for microwaving.
Tell me how you think a microwave cooks food?
They do vegetation control in larger easements, the power lines/electrcity aren't the only possible factor.
> what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the leukemia claim just as likely.
> Transmission lines are pretty harmless
Debatable. Some studies found this:
https://emfradar.com/articles/power-lines-childhood-leukemia
Then some other studies mostly invalidated that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-018-0097-7
There's a lot of people saying they aren't harmless but there's no credible evidence they aren't harmless. It's like flat earth, you know, there's no evidence the earth is flat.
There's a parcel of land in Texas that was left to the city to be used as a park, they've since sold it to a Data Center.
Though, this isn't strictly imminent domain... Just people being assholes.
There have been some pretty egregious misuses of eminent domain in the past, but using it for infrastructure is pretty much the quintessential justification. That's basically the only reason to have eminent domain at all. Arguing against it when that's how it's being used is, in my opinion, essentially arguing against the very concept of eminent domain. Which one can totally choose to do! But they should be up front about it, if that's what's going on.
As for the title, I would go further than you do. This is not a misleading title. It is a lying title. I'm usually a pretty big believer in Scott Alexander's Bounded Distrust [0] concept for the media where they very rarely actually, technically lie. This title (although not the article itself), in my opinion crosses that line.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust
It should be used for essential infrastructure for public use.
Power lines to a private DC seem to miss on both counts.
We run power lines to everything else: houses, offices, commercial buildings, factories, and so on. Any particular reasons we should have a special exception where we don't run them to data centers?
Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgrades.
Agreed. Since most land is already owned by private individuals do we freeze everything as is and do no further changes [1]?
The last house I lived in had an easement along the back property line. I built my fence on the easement knowing full well they would tear it up if they needed to access anything. I live in a denser town now where the power comes from the street to my house, wraps around my house, then lines to the next building over. I guess I should tell those people in the other building to figure out a different way to get power.
[1] Also feels a bit like the arguments against wind power.
> We run power lines to everything else
But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is overwhelming public benefit. I can't just say I want to build a factory and force access and utilities across my neighbours without their permission or an extraordinary process to prove that I'm going to provide massive local benefit (or national security).
If my factory wants to compete on an already contested resource (water, power), I should have to go further to show that I'm going to be a net benefit in my area.
As things stand, datacentres provide very an extraordinarily low employment density. They don't produce food. They consume an extraordinary amount of energy making it more expensive. And they money they generate concentrates wealth to billionaires. If you want your powerlines prove you're going to be beneficial. Start with a solar+batterty farm. You can surge from the network, and sell on slow days. Guarantee free power and network for locals. Integrate heat pumps to heat local homes in winter.
I've wandered off the topic of forcing permanent access to others land into broader planning, but it's all related.
>But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is
Ever since Kelo v New London we do.
> overwhelming public benefit.
This is just an appeal to authority that is predicated on the broad willful ignorance that the mean reader here will have toward how this particular sausage is made.
Read the proceedings. Half the time it's bullshit like "gravel pit or office park development wants an easement through undeveloped/agricultural/industrial parcels XYZ to build a road because that means they can exit closer to the highway which saves a bunch of money. They'd pay the land owner because at the end of the day it's money either way, they just think they can convince the state to stomp the land owner cheaper than they can pay off the land owner.
It’s ironic that Chinese “nail house” owners get more property rights than US citizens in the The Land of the Free (tm).
A blank cheque on corpo infrastructure just means that billionaires win and everyone else loses. At that point, just paint "Peasant Slave" on your forehead if you don't have a multi-million lobbying group at the state and federal level.
"All your base are belong to us" => Billionaires of USA
When that happens rename the nation to Corporate States of America as well.
But what if I want to live in a country with a growing economy and improving infrastructure? Forbidding all development does hurt corporations and the wealthy, but just in the sense that it hurts everyone, including them.
If we do want to soak the rich, can we do it in a progressive, targeted way (such as taxes) and not in a NIMBY way where we just say no one can build or improve anything?
Private Corpo Infra != Public Use Infra. They cannot be treated the same way.
If they pay enough, why not? What is public use infrastructure in your opinion? Any difference than building more houses (like a dense apartment complex) and extend the grid there? That's still private corp infrastructure.
There's a difference between "The state will seize your property" and "You may sell your property to the corporation at a rate you choose, and if you don't want to then they'll have to find some other land to use". In either case, development does happen, but the primary beneficiaries of the development (the owners of the data center) would have to pay the people who's land they're using (or taking!) instead of lobbying the government to just take it.
I think that unwitting land owners should not be subsidizing the AI grifters...
The only losers are foreign adversaries who would prefer it if your country didn't develop high-tech infrastructure and businesses.
ALL High-tech Infra that leverages "eminent domain" SHOULD be held in the name of the nation state for public good not by the billionaire or his corpo. All these private data centers that leverage eminent domain to grab land should be property of the state and only temporarily leased to the corpo.
Good point. Let's seize your house and make it a semiconductor fab.
> Arguing against it when that's how it's being used is, in my opinion, essentially arguing against the very concept of eminent domain
You're giving a blank check to use it as long as it's infrastructure, and as any simple rule, it's prone to get abused way beyond it's primary goal. IMHO the issue is nuance and balance, we should accept that whether it's applicable is an "it depends" matter.
Keeping it too simple and black and white means companies can now strategically place data centers and get the local government to seize all the land leading to it, and vice versa, local govs can nudge companies to target specific places to seize wherever they want. Especially as the plans aren't required to come to fruition.
(Submitted title was "Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers" but we've since changed the URL - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975572)
Actually, strictly speaking, it's /more/ debatable. Using eminent domain to seize land for the data centre itself gets a much more generally negative reaction, while seizing it for the purpose of infrastructure to supply said datacentre - and therefore, at least arguably, alleviate strain on the infrastructure used by everyone else - has more nuance and more room for debate.
Data centers increase strain on the grid, so their supply lines do too.
Data centers are a fixed load with on-site backup generators that can be used to shed load when the grid is stressed. Grids actually like that sort of thing. It lets them use more cheap renewables.
That makes no sense. Building new grid increases strain on the grid? No, it reduces strain, that's why they're doing it.
Without explanation, you think power plants aren't "the grid" that's being strained?
I think the grid is the grid, you know, the system of interconnections between electricity producers and consumers.
You learn something new every day.
Humans are dumb. Near my current city folks are debating a solar farm going up. Far enough out of the way that it has zero impact to anything he city, middle on nowhere farmland. The math was something silly, for farm use it would generate $15,000 or solar farm $1,000,000. I am probably embellishing the number from memory but it was staggering. Folks are still trying to fight it. It’s frustrating.
Farmers don’t like lines because you have to allow for an access road to it and it does not pay anywhere as well as say a cell tower.
It's more misleading than that. The power line that "may" "primarily"[1] serve a private data center has started construction "after nearly 20 years of planning, permitting and lawsuits"[2].
Per usual, NIMBYs continually move the goal posts and rely heavily on rhetoric to oppose a project. Data center opposition is providing them with great PR fodder, but they would have opposed these projects regardless. This is why infrastructure is so incredibly expensive in this country.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2025/11/oregon-regula...
[2] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2025/10/a-300-mile-po...
When it’s your house and land being stolen we’ll see how you feel
Are you under the impression people are not compensated by eminent domain?
In fact, a huge portion of the sentimental press stores over eminent domain are attempts by homeowners not to cancel the project, but to increase the payouts. Often the homeowners would be quite sad to see the project cancelled, they just want to milk the settlement via litigation.
I am under the impression that they are not compensated correctly when their land is taken.
I own the land that I do because I value it more than any other buyer/current bidder. (If that weren’t true, I’d sell it to the higher bidder.)
If, instead of bidding an attractive price for my land like an ordinary buyer, you win a court case or political process that says you can force me to sell my land at a “fair market value”, that previous point establishes that I’m being forced to take a loss, as I am being forced to accept a price lower than my reservation price.
At the same time, eminent domain must exist in order to let continuous projects like power lines and highways be built. I just think that 150% or 200% of what is currently called “fair market value” is a better reference price than 100% of it.
The taking of land against the owner’s will should come at a premium, but that premium should be capped rather than unbounded.
Yeah this is basically my take as well.
The problem with not having eminent domain is that without it, for any project of sufficient size you'll end up with ~100+ land owners who each individually have veto power over the entire project. If 99 of them freely agree to sell, but 1 is really stubborn and refuses to sell at any price, the project is dead.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma problem. Maybe it's not a big deal paying one stubborn guy 100x fair market value for his property to allow the project to continue. But if enough people think they can get 100x what their property is worth if they just hold out a bit longer, that also kills the project.
Eminent domain solves all this by making it so the project only has to to clear a few bars the government has set for it, rather than the many bars ~100 individual landowners set for it. But in the process it also erodes property rights and kills the built-in protections the free market has to ensure such transactions are fair.
A 1.5x or 2x multiplier on the fair market value would help with that a lot and help ensure eminent domain is only used in cases where it's strictly needed.
Or alternately, I sort of like the idea of letting the landowners elect someone to represent them in negotiations with the project developer, and then having a chance to vote yes/no on the final cash offer. Then the final price would still be set by a market of sorts, but there'd be no prisoner's dilemma or individual spoilers. Not 100% sure if that would work better or not though; it is a bit more complicated and there are still some issues with it.
Condemnation proceedings are the exception. Most of the time, the entity taking the land under the threat of eminent domain offers substantially above FMV, if only because condemnation proceedings cost money and, more importantly, time.
Some states do require above FMV for condemnation, e.g. 120%. After Kelo in the early 2000s, almost every state passed significant eminent domain reform.
Throw around NIMBY as a pejorative until you're blue in the face. Landowning residents have a civic duty to exercise their interests to prevent the remote monied and powerful from packaging their speculative investments as valuable infrastructure when the profits are privatized and the losses are socialized. The gambling addicts aren't going to spend a single day in prison when neglected overbuilt "infrastructure" directly causes mass casualties or pervert the shape of communities spanning generations.
Dunno why you think it's obvious that I should be able to have the state seize your house for my own personal infrastructure just because I demand I chew through so much electricity that the local infrastructure can't support my demands.
Do you have the same objection if it for a housing project, built by a private corp?
That's a practice that exists everywhere. This is an article about a case of expropriation in the Netherlands. The government frequently uses expropriation ("onteigening") to forcibly remove old, small wind turbines owned by private farmers to make room for massive, industrial-scale wind farms. In Dutch, so you'll need to swith on English translation:
https://www.dirkzwager.nl/kennis/artikelen/afdeling-bestuurs...
i definitely have internal debates on the idea of eminent domain and the nuances of wether i think its ok or not.
that said, i think i lean to it’s absolutely not ok to use eminent domain when the receivers of the benefits of the taken property are primarily one private industry and its owners.
i’d probably more often be ok with it if the benefits were mostly limited to being widely distributed to the people of that locality/region.
even then i go back and forth but i know for sure that plays a major part in how i see it.
I feel the same. When those large datacenter projects were being considered, the necessity for building new power lines should have been included in the ask. Instead they built the centers, then "notice" the system is straining and stick the public with the bill and local communities with the consequences. Classic "privatize profits and socialize risks".
Every consumer of electricity had to have power lines installed to their building in order to get electricity. They all then pay in proportion to how much electricity they use. The electric bill of a data center is large. It already includes the cost of building and maintaining power lines and generating power and everything else, because they all do, since that's what electric bills pay for.
In general the problem is the power company, having received a large new customer and therefore a lot of new revenue, who wants to stuff it in their pocket instead of using it to upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
Isn’t the entire point of this power line project to “upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand”?
A few alternative sources
https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/when-can-a-power-compan...
https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/policy/data-center-eminent...
Last one appears to be generated using AI, with no attribution to the original author
That seems perfectly reasonable. Eminent domain for power lines is about the most reasonable use of the tool. This kind of thing is what it’s there for.
Notice how when it comes to the interests of Capital, suddenly regulations or NIMBYs are rendered powerless. Building homes and infrastructure? Impossible. Building datacenters that will be obsolete in 4 years and abandoned just to fuel a speculation bubble? Yessir! Immediately, sir!
Indeed, suing “the Capital” is more costly and difficult.
Frankly I stopped caring about it.
The current system we live in is unsustainable and on the verge of breaking. We're headed towards something far worse than 1929, and there's nothing we can do to stop this train.
I started to believe this when snapshot had their IPO value at something like 5 Exxons or 24 General Motors, but was primed for this belief working on energy and carbon credit derivative markets during the early 2010s, an experience that made me start believing it is all a fucking casino.
Now, I just amuse myself watching the insanity.
You should care and do more. It's honestly sad to look at the destruction of your community and do nothing about it. There are plenty of groups that could use your help, go help them. Be part of something instead of an observer.
https://archive.ph/dUoBM
Opposition to eminent domain would be a lot less if the government had to pay say 10x market value.
flagged per the highly misleading title
The irony of this article that was originally posted completely free on The Conversation being stuck behind a Fortune paywall is a bit much.
https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-yo...
Ok, we've switched to that link from https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu... above. Thanks!
Are these AI-driven data centers actually getting built? I was reading about Kevin O’Leary’s initial proposal for his Utah data center and it’s just preposterous, it’s inconceivable anyone needs that much compute at any realistic demand level. The ask is so massively large that even the scaled down version is just absurd.
We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exposed as a glorified PR stunt without any substance. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-ap...
I happen to know some people who work for a company that helps build data centers. Business is booming for them, lots of projects all over the country (USA). So just to answer the straight up question of if they're actually getting built, yes they certainly are.
I’m not too deep into the matter but don’t they all have to wait in the interconnection queue first anyway? My understanding is that that alone will take some years
Most serious projects are building onsite power generation using natural gas to avoid this.
if you can actually simulate a stock market with fidelity, i believe that would be a distinct advantage.
probably not short trading, but investigating leveraging positions may be worth it.
Kevin O’Leary is a grifter and he should be completely ignored. He literally got rich conning HP (though they were stupid for going ahead with it).
That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.
I thought he got rich conning Mattel to buy The Learning Company in 1999? They paid $3.5B for it and gave it away a year later. Then there was a lawsuit with a $100M+ settlement.
Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.
Have you considered the compute demands for nationwide AI video surveillance?
AFAIK, video surveillance is less computationally expensive than LLMs, and much of the work can be done at the edge devices.
So don’t worry, there is already probably a nationwide video surveillance system out there, even without Kevin
Regardless of the computational needs to facilitate mass surveilance, there are inescapable storage needs precipitated by surveilance. Governments want to retain data because its value in the future is unknown in the present. This is the entire premise behind the Harvest Now Decrypt Later[0] principle that fuels much of the previous surveilance actions taken by governments. But HNDL is speculative; it either hedges on the bet that computational breakthroughs will weaken encryption methods to the point where brute force attempts at decryption are not financially feasible for most actors but still physically possible, or rely on a backdoor in an encryption algorithm to decrypt data that is valuable. There has been much speculation about this feasibility and value RE: quantum computation and also the design of encryption algorithms from the ground up (see things like the Clipper Chip and RSA's relationship with the NSA).
With things like video, photo, audio, and liturgical surveilance, the data is largely out in the open (or simply purchased from their hosting platforms, leading to social media and adtech companies like Facebook and Google being defense contractors by nature) and does not need to be decrypted (in most cases) - rather, it needs to be correlated. This is a great task for machine learning because that's what the field has largely been engineered to do for the last 60 years, but it relies so, so, so heavily on having data to both train on and use in its practice. Storage of all data is the perfect end-goal of a surveilance state. Storage requires data centers. Data centers of this calibre are effectively black sites in that they are nigh impenetrable in both practical and legal senses, and I'd wager many data centers host actual digital black sites simply due to their ubiquity as means of doing so coupled with the necessity of the hardware and facilities they provide that are needed for doing so.
Theres really nothing that will ever be publicly available that would say "this data center has a hundred thousand SOTA GPUs in it that are doing gait recognition on every camera in every airport in the world in real time" versus "this data center is a bunch of tape machines that store everything ever recorded from every facsimilie of Room 641A[1]".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now%2C_decrypt_later
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Harvest Now Decrypt Later principle holds very well for intelligence work, the harvested information could be useful for very long time.
You can see this in the long time intervals specified for Declassification of classified documents.
"Executive Order 13526 establishes the mechanisms for most declassifications, within the laws passed by Congress.[1] The originating agency assigns a declassification date, by default 25 years. After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States
"Decrypt Later" should generalized to "Use Later", many recordings are useful without decryption, just from the metadata you can establish who, when communicated. Identification of relations between persons, building of social graphs, is the basic of intelligence work. Much of this relationship analysis can be done just from metadata.
One example of such analysis is the NSA Co-Travel Analytics
"CO-TRAVELER does not simply collect location information. It creates a portrait of travel times and people who crossed paths, revealing our physical interactions and relationships. The cell site information goes beyond email and phone calls and ordinary telephony data, allowing the U.S. government to know who we are with in-person and where. This is information that would be impossible to collect using traditional law enforcement methods. "
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/meet-co-traveler-nsas-...
https://www.eff.org/files/2013/12/11/20131210-wapo-cotravele...
Well put; the scope of usefulness of surveilance data lies well beyond what is in that data itself, but how it relates to other data. You don't necessarily need to decrypt data to distill value from it, as its metadata (location, datetime, medium, etc.) is also (and potentially more) useful when related with other metadata. Storing this data is also a monumental task, given the fidelity of records that many consumer devices create, store, and upload.
Video-processing AI can be very flexible in its demands.
Even if a camera supports 4k 60fps video, the 'edge AI' can downscale the input to 224x224 2fps and use a small network.
Often the 'edge AI' just needs to detect humans/cars/pets and trigger saving some footage to an SD card/turning on a light. It's not the end of the world if it misses some things or raises false alarms sometimes.
And if you buy a Reolink on Amazon expecting it to be able to recognise a face from 20 yards away, you'll be disappointed.
IMO you highly underestimate the amount of processing and storage video surveillance requires. There is just no good way to determine if you took that pen or made the newly illegal handgesture towards the wrong person 12 years ago unless you have enough storage to keep all the footage around and the processing power to search through it or prepare it for new types of queries in reasonable time.
Also, have you considered AI being necessary to fill in for missing surveillance footage if the cameras are failing (the ruling class)? E.g. the whole Epstein (PR) disaster could have been avoided if the cameras could have been kept running and the footage post-processed in time.
I think like 30 - 40% of all the announced projects turned out to be financially viable. Possibly less.
Conversely I see heaps of already in progress data center builds and upgrades tacking AI on as the purpose as just PR to sell colo.
tell me again why ai datacenters in space make no sense
Cosmic rays, launch costs, relative impossibility of maintenance, difficulty of heat dispersal, added latency, interconnect interference, no way to recycle when decommissioning.
Or we could build a power line.
Along with lack of cooling, the cost to launch hardware means that "servers in space" can never recover startup costs.
It would blot out the sky, ~30,000 acres per Gigawatt
Heat rejection.
I am all for Communism and giving more priority to projects that help all society. But this is not it.
It would help if the power grid was public property, thou. It would help if the power grid was build so the majority of citizens profit. It would help if the power grid was build for someone else than big tech.
Meanwhile building railroads is impossible. Could we convince AI companies to build their datacenters on trains? USA would have in a few years the largest train network in the world.
The rare HN commie. I'm aware of one other one besides you and myself.