There are in the US, those places just have more hostile legislatures and regulatory regimes that make construction impossible. See the debacle around the Foxconn Wisconsin project which happened under a very industry friendly governor. The great lakes are has nearly infinite water, and cold aim all winter. What they don't have is the ability to build anything.
The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds. So, water utilization from the Great Lakes is constrained. The Wisconsin Foxconn project was a PR thing on both sides. Foxconn started scaling back it's promises and construction almost immediately after the agreement was signed. Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
> The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds.
Who said anything about diverting it? Pump cold water out, store hot water until it cools to ambient temps, then dump it back in the lake.
> Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
Yeah, this is my point, the state wasn't actually prepared to see the deal through despite nominally being industry friendly vs Arizona where they have some follow through.
> No they do not. The flow there is already balanced, and lake levels are lower than usual.
You aren't going to meaningfully drain the lakes to cool chip fabs when the vast majority of that water will simply go back into the lake either directly or via the water cycle. It's not going to run off the land and into a river like with flood irrigation or similarly irresponsible water uses. The entire global chip industry today uses less water than the city of Hong Kong.
That’s not how the water system works. It’s not like all the evaporated water will end up in the lakes. California uses a lot of water for farming, it’s not like all the evaporated water ends up in the Sierras all the time. Water cycle is complex and reducing it to “it will just end up back to where it came from” is pretty reaching.
Besides it’s not just the evaporation. The leftover water concentrates a lot of the impurities that already exist in the water, and not all of it ends up in proper treatment facilities, which in turn pollutes the place wherever it ends up being. This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
California is very arid, when water evaporates it rains out over the ocean or farther north. The upper mid-west is very wet and the evaporated water will come back down over the Great Lakes watershed which is enormous.
> This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon
The problem in that part of Oregon was preexisting contamination in the drinking water.
"the county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked."
Discharging a little data center water back into lake Michigan isn't going to make any difference. The entire discharge of ever data center in the world wouldn't register.
They do use evaporative cooling. A few sites aren't going to have a big impact on a Great Lake though, especially when lots of that evaporated water ends up falling in the basin.
There's a Microsoft datacenter being built on the proposed Foxconn site and it will use 8.4 million gallons of water per year, so I guess industry got its way eventually?
That is <10% of the amount of water required to grow corn on the same land as the data center. Acre for acre, data centers consume a tiny fraction of the water consumed by agriculture.
Are the corn subsidies to produce high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol that important?
East of the rockies suffers from the problem of water being so unlimited nobody paid it any attention and let the desert states let federal policy reflect their problems and priorities to their detriment.
I think this is because when the water table is as saturated as it is in much of the east, there's no sense in trying to conserve. The water pumped out of the river just ends up on the ground, goes in the watershed, and back down the river. Caveat: Note that I'm talking about surface water. Fossil water sources like the Ogallala Aquifer being overused are another story entirely.
>when the water table is as saturated as it is in much of the east, there's no sense in trying to conserve. The water pumped out of the river just ends up on the ground, goes in the watershed, and back down the river.
The laws of nature may agree with you but the laws of man do not and lawfulness comes at great expense.
As someone in Indiana that is fighting tooth and nail to keep datacenters out (they don't bring jobs, taxes, or revenues and eat up very valuable resources), I say if you want to build here, then move your HQ and 10s thousands of high paid workers here.
How does the data center "eat resources"? Discharged water will stay in the watershed and it rains back down on you. As long as they aren't drawing directly out of the aquifer without putting it back then its fine. How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then.
Gary Indiana had a massive infrastructure for cooling and water diversion for their mega steel industry. Electricity already in place, again for steel industry, and anything it would sink would be a drop in the bucket of the Chicago metropolitan area (so Illinois would eat much of the externalities of whatever hypothetical minor price increase of electricity) grid that it's connected to and likely far less than they were using for their steel jobs.
Probably best to just let it stay an industrial wasteland shithole rather than put datacenters there.
Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers - even when the AI bubble bursts in a few years, the electricity prices will stay high (or in the worst case, get even higher) because the utility needs to recoup its investments.
> How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then.
Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. If you were to extract the appropriate amount of taxes to cover for the costs, you'd have to raise them so high that you'd strangle the entire rest of your local economy. And stuff like we have here in Europe, taxing corporate profits, is not applicable as well because the profit is officially being made at some Delaware site (or Ireland in our case), not at some random datacenter.
> Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers
It seems like new power generation should be a trivial concern, the upper Midwest is incredibly windy. The block to adding new generation is mostly antiquated local/state laws about connecting to the grid interchange. It's within local power to fix that. It's the power company lobbying against more cheap energy that causes prices to rise. Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power.
> Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size.
Then assess them on that basis. Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
> Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power.
It's still waste. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, all these data centers will not be around as consumers any more. Just look what happened after the dot-com crash, and I'm not alone in thinking that the AI crash will be even worse than that.
And once again, it will be the taxpayers left with the bill, with half-constructed ruins being a blight on their neighborhoods, and with homeless moving in to the ruins and causing fires and police calls.
> Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
Good luck trying to stand up as a community of, say, 10.000 people against the lawyers of a multi-billion dollar company. They will find loopholes or in the worst case get your entire law tossed out in court.
That is why people are pissed, they know that the rich can afford to do whatever the fuck they want, with zero respects for the people affected by it.
> Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers
Commercial power is often charged differently than residential power, and there's also nothing that prevents charging disproportionately higher rates for e.g. 90th percentile power usage.
There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
> There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
Well the utility will have to make investments that are on a depreciation schedule anywhere on the scale of 20-50 years... so there will have to be a general rate hike to cover for the bank loan (banks aren't stupid, they want at least something in incoming cashflow increase), and when the AI bubble pops, guess who will have their rates hiked a second or third time? Yup the average consumers.
If adding a datacenter to a locale is not a net gain for the locale, you're failing to charge appropriately for things you should be charging for.
I'm sure there have been some datacenters that have tried to use "brings in jobs" incentives, and that could certainly go wrong if the incentives aren't designed correctly (e.g. proportional to the actual number of jobs), but as long as there aren't incentives being abused, a datacenter should be a net win.
Yeah seriously. If you're going to fight. "tooth and nail" against a data center, maybe reevaluate and direct your energy towards some productive like better tax laws, more energy generation, and so on.
What about building along the ocean coastlines and/or pipe water in from coastlines? If you can't use it unless it is desalinated, then figure out how to desalinate it and what you'll do brine/salt.
That’s the problem. There aren’t that many areas with plenty of water.