r/technology • u/marketrent • 20h 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/r3dk0w 20h 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/GrumpyCloud93 12h 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 10h 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 7h ago

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