Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built

Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built wsj.com

30 points•JumpCrisscross•3 days ago•38 comments•

#every #data #10k #center #household #town #receives #rural

38 comments

proc03 days ago

Pocket change. They should stocks. Everyone should get stocks considering AI is trained on everyone's data.

They'd probably lose money on the stocks with the way things are going. It'd let the owners offload risk. The residents are free to use the money to buy stocks if they want to.

JumpCrisscross3 days ago

An annual recurring payment may honestly be the way to do it.

stevemk14ebr3 days ago

That's for the recipient to decide

proc03 days ago

If the stocks lose value then nothing was really lost, since it would mean AI is a bubble and not much will change. This would be to offset whatever impact AI will have. The more it succeeds the more people get paid. Not saying it's a good idea, but I do think it's better than UBI.

gruez3 days ago

>Everyone should get stocks considering AI is trained on everyone's data.

Anthropic's IPO is rumored to be $2T. For the sake of argument let's round it up to 10T to account for openai and any post IPO pop. For the sake of argument let's also assume the US government straight up expropriates any stake existing shareholders have. With those rosy assumptions, you get a whopping $29.4k per American. That's a nice stimmy check (but beware inflation!), but that's less than 2 years of federal government expenses.

xboxnolifes3 days ago

I think you're downplaying how much money $29k is to most people. That's 5-10x the total covid stimulus, and it's not as inflationary because it's redistributing wealth, not printing money.

echoangle3 days ago

Can’t you just buy the stocks with the money?

proc02 days ago

As time goes by every data center would pay more assuming AI demand keeps increasing. A flat payment is a good deal for them.

tlhunter3 days ago

Sure, it's not much money to us, but it's probably a lot of money to most of the voting population.

Natfan3 days ago

given that 60% of the usamerican populace lives paycheck to paycheck, this is accurate

iAMkenough2 days ago

the one-time payment will decrease the value of property they own, and increase their monthly expenses, but maybe they've been brainwashed into thinking otherwise and will take the bait

yellowapple3 days ago

It's enough money to me to be worth taking.

vivzkestrel3 days ago

i approve of the data center, can you please give me a mac studio with max configuration instead of 10000$

s1artibartfast3 days ago

I dont understand why data center development is so location specific.

Is it proximity to the city power grids and fiber backbones?

Seems that would be solvable then land is trivial if they go somewhere without objetors

protocolture3 days ago

More power than anything* the fibre usually comes later.

One going up near me is being built on the site of an old coal fired power plant. Lots of juice and an old dam for water. Theres not exactly 2000 cores of fiber out that way, but I am sure it will come eventually.

Theres some going into old paper mills and logging camps too, same sort of thing, near water, lots of juice, out of the way.

*Sometimes theres a simultaneous fibre buildout, or they are built where theres a lot passing through but its less of a concern afaik.

yellowapple3 days ago

> More power than anything* the fibre usually comes later.

This depends a lot on the datacenter. Some are sited specifically around proximity to existing fiber, or more especially proximity to places where multiple fiber backbones intersect (e.g. carrier hotels / meet-me-rooms). There's a datacenter going up here in Reno to that exact effect, with a lot of the public complaints being “but why do we need a datacenter in the middle of town?” even though:

1) that's where multiple fiber backbones intersect

2) it's being built in a mixed commercial/industrial zone with other datacenters already there

3) the company building it has another datacenter dead smack in the middle of Downtown doing similar carrier hotel stuff, and the new one is an extension of that

Barrin923 days ago

basically. You'd need to build out electricity and network infrastructure and that's not like plugging a cable into a pole. With the amount of power you need voltage substations, transmissions lines, upgrades to the existing grid, land assessments etc.

And obviously with it tons of skilled labor and people that would have to live somewhere.

downrightmike2 days ago

Gotta have a local population large enough to absorb all the power grid upgrades. If the population is too small datacenters might have to pay it.

wackycat2 days ago

Not enough to cover the healthcare costs down the line from the exposure. Who knows what long term proximity/exposure to data centers does to the human body? My guess is nothing good based on the reports from farmers about bees and cows.

Eddy_Viscosity22 days ago

The property values will fall more than that easily.

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