This article is seriously underselling the problem.

Yes, all of this is accurate, and its good data for people fighting back against data centres. They produce shockingly few jobs, and the most highly paid of those will likely be experts moved in from elsewhere.

But there's a far bigger problem; AI data centres have no path to profitability. The cost of GPUs is so astronomically high and the depreciation so insanely fast that even if 3,000 - 4,000 data centres worth of AI compute demand materializes (it won't; companies like Meta are already selling their own unused compute because demand is so weak), they still won't be profitable, ever.

The article talks about how the permanent employment offered - on paper - is in the tens to low hundreds and that's true, but the real employment is mostly going to be zero. In five years time 99% of these projects will be abandoned before completion, or turned into skate parks.

They seem 0% great already, though?

You mean like taxpayer funded sports stadiums?

We are not building anything, there are 5-6 insane fucking techbro shitheads with god complexes and one demented old pedophile that are dictating the path this country is taking, no one else wants these fucking things

The AI boom is starting to look a lot like past »economic development« promises: huge tax incentives, massive power consumption, and surprisingly few permanent local jobs. If taxpayers are footing part of the bill, it’s fair to ask whether communities are getting enough in return.

The economics don’t seem great to most people, and even then, the economics aren’t as great as they seem.

I went to a homemade meat-and-3 place in the very red south yesterday and a very Republican looking man in his late 70s was proudly showing off his NO DATA CENTERS t-shirt to everyone in line. Nobody, nobody, nobody wants this shit. The same county just ran a company out, but they managed to still get others underway. It's hard to keep up with all of it.