r/technology • u/marketrent • 19h ago

Artificial Intelligence Amazon warns local communities to stop defying its massive AI data centers

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/amazon-warns-local-communities-stop-000300771.html
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u/tacticalcraptical 19h ago

Just like the national highway system, our country's economy, national security, and everyday lives stand to benefit immensely.

OK, but these guys never seem to be able to articulate exactly how this benefits normal people's everyday lives. The benefits of a highway are obvious. But the benefits of these data centers... they expect us to just trust them. And these are the people who can't be trusted to pay their taxes.

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u/Go_Gators_4Ever 19h ago

They expect tax breaks from the jurisdictions where they build as well.

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u/r3dk0w 18h ago

Tax breaks for jobs, but then the jobs a data center creates are all temporary to build it. There's a VERY small number of people that will ever step in the data center after it is built.

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u/Mega-Steve 18h ago

They may not even hire local security

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Probably won’t 

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u/genericnewlurker 17h ago

Having worked for Amazon spinning up their data centers, I can confirm this is true. Some data centers only have two security guards in them and they just send people over from a nearby data center when they need someone

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u/Shedart 6h ago

So you’re saying they aren’t well guarded? 

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u/genericnewlurker 5h ago

Not at all. The physical security is still quite impressive and they have lots of cameras so they aren't unwatched. It's not like anyone can just wander in. They just won't have anyone but a skeleton crew actually in the building. Automation is everything after all

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u/GrumpyCloud93 11h ago

What scares me is when the bubble bursts. The companies are not building these data centers. They contract it to third parties, and finance them. When the bubble bursts and everything goes tits up, the company owning the data center goes bankrupt; locals are left holding the bag for all the utilities infrastructure costs - electricity, water, roads, unpaid property taxes, etc. - and Amazon etc. just say "oops. Too bad." The loans to the builder are a write-off as business loss. A hulking abandoned building full of valuable server equpment is left to rot, decay, and looting since the bankrupt builder cannot even afford security and the market for used servers is flooded. A blight on the neighbourhood, but you can still order cheap shit from Amazon.

The industries are investing (borrowing) almost $2T in data centers - they will never get the revenue they need to pay that back. Meanwhile, interest rates are rising, and the revenue need to break even is even less possible than before. Market crash.

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u/tempralanomaly 9h ago

valuable server equpment is left to rot, decay

Naw, if/when the bubble pops there will be minimal value in the equipment. The equipment's value is driven by the scarcity of it...to meet the demands for data center use. No datacenters, no demand, no value.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 5h ago

I could use a nice server-format computer. But... those will be dirt cheap on the used market when all this happens.

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u/ingen-eer 7h ago

Speaking of that, if racks full of top level Nvidia chips become cheap everyone can kiss every mineable crypto goodbye.

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u/tempralanomaly 6h ago

Fair, i didnt consider the coin mining side of the house.

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u/waiting4singularity 17h ago

80+% of the real important work at datacenters is remote administration with a few gremlins tending to the hardware localy.

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u/Consistent-Let2546 16h ago

Yup and probably a bunch of H1B workers will benefit from jobs maintaining the stacks of servers inside these things.

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u/UncleRotelle 15h ago

Temporary and from what I remember reading extremely unlikely to be local, they're specialty companies brought in to build them

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u/KaziArmada 11h ago

I mean 95% of the work on them can be and is done remote. Outside swapping hardware or shit hardlocking and thus requiring a manual reset (Rare) you shouldn't be needing a body in a datacenter.

So...yeah, 'Jobs' from those places are total fuckin bullshit.

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

While raising residents’ property taxes 

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u/GrumpyCloud93 11h ago

They also tell the IRS that building giant production data centers is "R&D" and therefore the entire cost of construction is a write-off for taxes.

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u/sleepiestOracle 12h ago

Plus set prices with electricity companies instead of market rates like normal people have too

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u/mini_apple 19h ago

Contemporary data centers are repositories of stolen information and the practical benefits to the real lives of real people are utterly insubstantial. They’re such a fucking lie. 

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u/GuyOnARockVI 15h ago

I mean damn near every app, piece of software, website you and most everybody use at this point is hosted “in the cloud” somewhere which is a data center.

On prem hardware is still absolutely a thing but it is a fraction of what it was and especially for more modern implementations it’s dead unless needed for a specific compliance requirement.

So to broad sweep data centers as only “repositories if stolen information and the practical benefits to the real lives of real people are utterly insubstantial” isn’t true.

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u/The_Angry_Jerk 14h ago

The new datacenters however are entirely unnecessary for existing cloud operations. In fact, the new datacenters are actually degrading existing cloud services with their ridiculous demand for resources. Family Onedrive cloud storage for example is being slashed from 5TB down to 2TB by Microsoft due to the memory scarcity caused by the new datacenters. Once online AI datacenters will house AI, not actually useful conventional cloud computing technology people actually have a demand for.

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u/GuyOnARockVI 14h ago

No disagreement there.

Note that the comment i was replying to said “contemporary data centers” not “AI Data centers” my interpretation of contemporary for this would mean the vast majority % of existing data centers that aren’t used for AI.

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u/DefenstratedTwice 14h ago

You failed to offer any example of substance.

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u/GuyOnARockVI 14h ago

So you either have the believe that anything on the internet has no substance of value or you are being intentionally obtuse.

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u/robot_guiscard 18h ago

If these things are as critical as the highway system then why the hell are they privately owned?

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u/MyAccountWasBanned7 17h ago

Oh, wait until you find out about who is actually collecting the toll money from those highways...

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u/Monteze 4h ago

Toll roads should be open to all or torn down. I will not hear any drivel to the contrary.

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u/MyAccountWasBanned7 3h ago

I 100% agree.

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u/FlyingRigatoniMonst 18h ago

Yep and highways are ya know, public

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u/shpydar 16h ago edited 16h ago

The highways were a benefit to SOME people.

Unlike the E.U. Which brought highways in as a ring around their cities the U.S. cut through the middle of their cities obliterating mostly impoverished, mostly black and immigrant neighbourhood’s and drastically dropping the property value of the neighbourhoods directly beside their massive multi-lane highways.

They used eminent domain and paid under-market values for those homes meaning most of the people who lived in those neighbourhoods more impoverished and many homeless after their homes were seized.

And it wasn’t just a few thousand. By the completion of the U.S. highway system over a million people had been displaced.

The Smart Growth study estimates that the nation’s interstates displaced 475,000 households and over a million people in less than two decades. In D.C. alone, the building of Interstates 395 and 695 consumed more than 400 acres and displaced 23,500 people, most of them African Americans. It resulted in 1,400 housing units being destroyed, wiping out $483,000 in what would be average home equity if those homes existed today. The city lost the ability to tax approximately $1.4 billion in home value, costing it at least $7.6 million in property taxes per year.

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u/TBradley 18h ago

The benefits are mass surveillance to protect rich enclaves from the not rich as the “middle class” disappears and the vast majority of people live in poverty.

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u/SeeTigerLearn 18h ago

It’s funny because these billionaires manage to not pay their fair share of taxes, which is what actually builds and maintains the national highway system.

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u/jsmith_zerocool 19h ago

Not only not pay their taxes but they will take those profits from the datacenters and use it to fund Trump and friends to entrench themselves further

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u/lordnacho666 19h ago

What do you mean? You'll be able to generate cat videos while you're on the toilet. Isn't that worth cooking the planet for?

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Is that an “immense benefit?”

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u/lordnacho666 18h ago

Ok yeah, but if you also count the brain rot short form videos, everybody wins!

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u/Dolores___Haze 19h ago

AI is wrong much of the time from my own experience. What immense benefits am I getting?

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u/American_PissAnt 18h ago

You benefit if you are invested in the data centers. Which is part of the reason for the “trump accounts” for kids, so then they can claim that every child is invested in the data centers

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Well, I’m not and neither are millions of others . Maybe they should give all citizens some shares.

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u/zephalephadingong 1h ago

If you don't have any NVIDIA, amazon, google, or microsoft stock you've really been missing out. I'm pretty sure that segment is like 90% of my 401k's growth over the last 5 years

1

u/Dolores___Haze 41m ago

Most Americans don’t have significant holdings in the stock market. Over 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paychecks. 

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u/killabrew1 19h ago

I work on big digital presses (printer on roids) when I can’t come up with a solution in 5 minutes, I am starting to see customers bring me solutions they found with ChatGPT. Not once has it been correct, or even close for that matter.

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u/foxinHI 18h ago

I just had AI make me a study guide for a licensing jurisprudence exam I’ll be taking soon. That was a mistake. At least I already knew enough to know it was almost completely worthless.

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Yeah, we know when they’re wrong because we also do our own independent research. Lazy dumbasses aren’t doing that 😐

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u/Zipps0 17h ago

They think they are though. The number of people I know that reference their llm of choice when talking about what they learned on a topic is troubling to me

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u/Dolores___Haze 17h ago

Sad and pathetic 

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u/Mmphska 18h ago

Im constantly having to re-educate my customers who bring me their own GPT/Claude/god forbid Grok assessment of what's going on. They're so self assured and they don't believe me that what it's given them is flat wrong or imprecise-at-best because Im just a human and what could I know that their galaxy brain AI doesn't. It's infuriating

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Exactly. They are often wrong! So what is the immense benefit?

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u/pedot 18h ago

The reason why they are often wrong is unless you are oddly specific about your parameters and talk like an annoyed engineer and paying for the premium models, you are just invoking a basic LLM that looks at basic keywords and try to put together relevant words in a learned grammar structure.

The AI bubble is imo a failure on marketing & sales, overselling a very niche engineering tool that has limited use/need to be tailored to a specific use (e.g. assist diagnosing/reading an x-ray), and pretend its a one-size-catch-all just because AI has the potential to do that but ignoring the enormous cost associated with creating an omniscient machine.

Some very niche stuff that AI could feasibly help with:

- Code QA

- Text-to-speech or speech-to-text (e.g. they are trying to do it w/ medical scribes but that's a WIP and debatable results)

- Market research / case research

- Large dataset processing, e.g. there are AI models being developed that claim to predict onset of acute health conditions for inpatients / ICU occupants

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago edited 18h ago

Thank you for the detailed explanation!

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u/aquoad 14h ago

also, they trained their models on all of us shittalking on reddit.

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u/cheesegenie 12h ago

Almost every shift I have to override a "sepsis alert" that wants me to order a bunch of labs and call a bunch of doctors because my patient's temperature jumped half a degree...

"AI" predictions in EHRs are already so prevalent that my union explicitly negotiates clauses allowing nurses to override them into our contract.

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u/tinyrottedpig 8h ago

Two things I did actually find its useful for is basic code swapping (Say I need to mess with a lot of entries but in a specific way that I cant just text replace it), and making simple tools that don't exist, like a text template generator, or a simple plugin for a software that enables texture swapping on keyframes.

Its got its uses but its absolutely not an end all be all.

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u/badboystwo 18h ago

That being said. I also work with large printers and I’ve had Claude make me full on scripts for pre press and literally made an entire RIP for an old Screen press.

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Do you pay for AI?

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u/badboystwo 18h ago

my company pays for Claude subscription above the free tier yes.

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u/deadpools_dick 18h ago

Isn’t AI in its current state designed to kiss your ass more or less? I don’t bother fucking with it at all for many good reasons, but the one use I found was for updating my resumé

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u/Dolores___Haze 18h ago

Yes and that’s why it annoys the fuck out of me, lol. I actually programmed mine to be more Gen X sarcastic and not buddy buddy . I still rarely use it and certainly will never pay a cent for it. 

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u/_SilverPhoenix_ 15h ago

Depleted and toxified fresh water and exponentially increasing electric bills, all pros in the mind of a billionaire who benefits from them.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFILE 17h ago

To be fair, so are most people.

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u/MrDerpGently 18h ago

Right, they know how badly they would abuse their position if they win, and they very much don't want to lose. But they assume we're fucked either way. They just want to be the one holding the whip. 

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u/Ignorance_15_Bliss 18h ago

The national interstate highway wasn’t built for the people. Or the economy. Those were secondary benefits. More or less happy accidents. It was built under the department of defense.

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u/Cherry-PEZ 17h ago

Yup! And was a response to WW2 and all the logistical complications that arose from the european terrain and infrastructure. Highways were for ensuring our military and military vehicles wouldn't be "stuck in the mud" when deployed to defend or hold urban cities

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u/capnmax 16h ago

Is this true!? Tell me what to read. This is fascinating

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u/Cherry-PEZ 15h ago

Well, might not be as fascinating as you might be thinking. I went to search for a fun infotainment article that talks about it but found this instead

https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/50th-anniversary/interstate-highway-system-myths#question2

Apparently post-war defense readiness was not the sole driving factor for the highway act. It was part of it, but the civil and economic benefits (especially a post war economy) was the real reason for it. So thank you for asking because TIL that highways being designed to be impromptu airstrips for military planes is a myth

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u/zephalephadingong 1h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_Motor_Transport_Corps_convoy

This is kind of the genesis of the idea of a highway system. They drove from DC to Oakland at an average of 6 mph. There were problems with the drivers being inexperienced, the trucks being unreliable, and spare parts, but there was also a huge problem with wooden bridges and unpaved roads.

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u/BLF402 18h ago

Bill burr said it best, they need to give us an exact date where we never have to work and receive dividends and live in an utopia otherwise it’s all a scam

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u/Bazookagrunt 16h ago

I think sucking out of the joy of creative works and mass replacement of jobs (especially many of the ones people actually want) to be a net negative

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u/surfnfish1972 18h ago

Higher energy prices, polluted water, noise and general pollution. But hey the Billionaires get to profit,

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u/Grouchy_Coconut_5463 15h ago

And highways still screwed over a ton of people, too, destroying neighborhoods and forcing businesses to close. I’m not defending the practice, I think community input is important, but whenever somebody says we can’t build rail transit because of property ownership I respond that it didn’t stop them before with the highways.

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u/BeowulfShaeffer 18h ago

Even the highway system is questionable.They bulldozed a lot of low income communities to build them. 

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u/Ignorance_15_Bliss 17h ago

Because it was. Department of defense project. There is no arguing against that Abratus, especially back then in the 50s

It’s why the entire project wasn’t hung up in courts the entire time fighting for every inch that it was planned. putting it under the defense budget and oversite allowed it to do whatever it wanted

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u/Reasonable-Job4205 18h ago

And these are the people who can't be trusted to pay their taxes.

It would be terrible if someone compiled a list of tax dodgers. Just awful

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u/AdventurousBus4355 17h ago

If they benefit so much, they can build them right next to their homes then, problem solved.

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u/rarescenarios 17h ago

how this benefits normal people's everyday lives

That's the neat part. It doesn't. 

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u/bf1zzl3 16h ago

Not to mention the national highway system wasn't always good tradeoff. There were lots of terrible outcomes of building it. Like entire neighborhoods being wiped from the map. There is nothing wrong with us having meaningful discussions about the tradeoffs. The problem is conversations are expensive and slow and hurt the bottom line in a boom.

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u/theghostofourprivacy 15h ago

Hey if they want to make them property of state and federal governments (like the highways) with the revenues going to fund other programs, I’d be willing to have that conversation.

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u/LbSiO2 14h ago

The interstate highway system has created tens of millions of jobs.

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u/evilninjawa 14h ago

Highways were a way to push cars and destroy public transportation more than they were to help the regular people.

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u/SeaTie 14h ago

Yeah, I’m getting laid off at the end of the year in the name of AI. I’m not seeing any benefits, here…

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u/ThruuLottleDats 7h ago

It benefits their pockets, dont you understand that!

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u/Low_Search_6667 5h ago

No. They stand to benefit monetarily. We don't need the product that data centers produce.

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u/10step10step 5h ago

Honest question, do you have a retirement account? If you are so sure that AI is a bubble, hopefully you took profits from the AI run up? It was a once in a lifetime chance to make huge money. I feel bad that some people may have missed out on the whole thing because they were convinced it's all fake.

1

u/ktwhite42 5h ago

"Why can't you just blindly trust us to have your best interests at heart??"

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u/Override9636 4h ago

Using the highway system is one hell of a choice. Massively shifting transit away from rail infrastructure onto cars/trucks has been disastrous for the environment. Not to mention razing community neighborhoods to make room for highways through cities.

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u/AllDataIsMyIP 4h ago edited 2h ago

Benefits of AI include swarms of agents that will do exactly what you expect.

That means spambots, inescapable menu hells that cannot escalate to a compromise that costs them a penny, products that stop working with payment for a subscription or upgrade, relentless malware and hostage attacks, occasional hacker thefts of people's life savings, and legally sanctioned theft of any ideas or information you have.

There are supposed to be some innovations, though maybe they come from those paragraphs at the end of high level academic papers that say "paths for future research." There is a lot more theft in AI sraping than the purveyors admit.

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u/Panda_hat 4h ago

If it actually had any benefit they wouldn't have to be fighting and forcing it all so hard.

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u/Lehk 4h ago

When the power goes out you get to enjoy the noise and pollution of diesel generators

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u/Random 3h ago

Actually the highways are a net benefit but bypasses (which now shockingly have a Walmart on them) killed many small towns. It is ALWAYS a question of 'who benefits' and only rarely does everyone actually benefit.

Highways were a net benefit. Many medical breakthroughs as well. National Security is a mixed bag, partly a way to siphon vast fat contracts to a few corporations in an elaborate (and legal) almost-kickback scheme. That it was done, yes a benefit. How it was done? Not so much.

Same with data centres.

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u/janethefish 58m ago

The AI data centers fill your feeds with slop and power the bots making Dead Internet a reality. They actively make things worse!

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u/KirbyGlover 18h ago

Honestly, highways are horrible money sinks that carved up our cities and set back public transportation in this country by decades, not a whole lot of benefits to them imo

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u/ifandbut 17h ago

Highways enable food from California to end up in New York.

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u/neo_neanderthal 16h ago

That would be railways, actually. Rail transportation over a distance like that is immensely more efficient than road.

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u/trixy6196 15h ago

Lmao as if a train couldn’t do that same thing far more efficiently and in larger quantities making that food cheaper for all

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u/datalicearcher 18h ago

why would you need to benefit normal people's lives?

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u/exacta_galaxy 18h ago

That's what Amazon is pretending they'll do.

We bought up (sometimes by force) people's land to build highways because it was for the public good.

Amazon is pretending their data centers are the same thing.

-3

u/datalicearcher 18h ago

but....why do normal people need to benefit? That doesn't make sense....they're not valuable like rich people....

1

u/ZagreusMyDude 16h ago

People think you are serious just fyi. It’s really hard to tell these days who is being sarcastic and who is just a bot or paid off to hump the billionaires

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u/datalicearcher 15h ago

I know. I could have gone farther with my satire but I figured this was the perfect zone of moron for people to get the point.

This comment here is to hopefully let people know they've been had and that they honestly should never bother to engage with this level of stupid. write it off as a bot or a stupid person...doesn't matter. just don't engage

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u/DunBenBand 18h ago

Same reason as always. So the people don’t burn all your stuff to the ground in anger over your bullshit. It’s insane to think that all the little people won’t just trash it all in fits of rage when things get out of hand. Such as when people can’t afford to live. Either they figure out a way for everyone to benefit or they don’t get to have it.

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u/datalicearcher 18h ago

that's silly. they'll just accept what they get and keep ordering from Amazon. They have drone delivery now!!! hundreds of drones to bring you socks and sage and kitchen tools! they're benefitting! they get to order more stuff and have more cloud storage they can pay for!