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arjie 7 hours ago [-]
What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset.
This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
My employer went through a similar process, not for a data center but for a large recycling yard/center. We had to buy the land first, and it was basically unproductive for 2.5 years of mostly waiting for permits, and it was already zoned industrial so no zoning changes were needed.
The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to take that long it but a real strain on the business.
So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.
nixgeek 5 hours ago [-]
It’s unusual to buy the land and take a gamble on its utility, at least whenever datacenter construction is involved. Purchasing parties are risk averse to this exact scenario and work hard to craft contracts that reduce risk.
Often the choices are —
1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is your example. But problematically all permitting applications are typically public record, so when you fail, the land can’t be sold on to someone else as if that didn’t happen, any sophisticated buyer will know the exact issues the city/county had with your usage. Land often transacts onward at firesale prices under these circumstances.
2. $/acre for land is bid upon at a substantial premium reflecting the future value as a datacenter, it remains under contract for potentially years pending outcome of approvals, then it transacts. Permitting being denied usually results in either no money changing hands or a small termination fee reflecting the carrying cost of the land during that period. If permitting works out the seller of land walks away very happy as the $/acre was extremely lucrative.
edmundsauto 4 hours ago [-]
The second option also incentivizes the seller, who is often a local real estate magnate, to pressure local officials to issue the permits.
dnnddidiej 3 hours ago [-]
2 seems good as the seller can still make money from the land in the meantime. It does make it unsellable to anyone else in that time though.
LtWorf 52 minutes ago [-]
If you are microsoft, you know you will get the permit.
redanddead 46 minutes ago [-]
No you don’t. The overall risk is baked into the strategy, but any individual plan is always a toss up, and they have insurance policies for if one or all fail
cbdevidal 5 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: Large businesses are often tapped to write the laws intended to target large businesses. The process is called “model legislation.” Fox and henhouse.
hylaride 4 hours ago [-]
It's also called "regulatory capture" and it's been around in some form (implicitly or explicitly) since there's been laws in existence.
toss1 5 hours ago [-]
Well, businesses — and all parties — who will be affected by legislation should be able to provide input. Otherwise we too often get clueless legislation that is massively mocked and rightly bemoaned on this site — because the legislators have no real clue of the technical issues involved.
Of course, the businesses should be only one part of the expertise that goes into writing the laws; other experts MUST be involved, or it will indeed be a fox and henhouse situation where the fox designs the legal locks so they can always be opened by foxes...
parineum 5 hours ago [-]
That's not what model legislation is.
That can be an example of model legislation but, broadly, model legislation is created by an organization for use as an example for multiple different legislatures (usually states). Everyone from think tanks, busineses, the EFF, the ACLU and PETA draft model legislation.
beau_g 2 hours ago [-]
A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then you can sell or redevelop later. Now I am expecting a spinoff to Mister Inference and Quick Flops as these sprawling networks of carwashes turn into data centers in 2030
vel0city 1 hours ago [-]
I would imagine car washes to be one of the more difficult kinds of businesses to operate just to hold a lot. You often need a lot of work on drainage and permeability to ensure you're not contaminating local water systems with your car wash.
Storage though, yeah, that makes sense.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve had multiple friends try to start businesses that got stuck on this: You can’t really get permits until you have the property and start drawing up plans.
For simple businesses like a retail store in a location that has other retail it’s not too risky to bet that you’ll be approved, too.
For businesses with unique needs or that happen to be in the public crosshairs, you’re putting a lot at risk in the process.
The process favors big companies and developers who have established relationships and “connections” with the planning boards.
The situation is even wilder in some other countries, both more and less corrupt than the average US municipality. In some places you’re not getting a permit at all without a sizable bribe, or having an in with the planning board.
In my city one of the aspiring developers tried to run an expensive political campaign to get a family member into an office that could have helped with their approvals. People caught on and didn’t like it one iota.
bearjaws 2 hours ago [-]
Here in Orlando two large builders bought about 90% of downtowns empty lots (and several older buildings) promising new high rises in 2022, then threw in the towel after evicting all the tenants and now most of Church street station is completely empty. Of course local government had put nothing in the agreement about time frame of completion, what happens if the builder gives up, etc.
So now, all of it sits abandoned, no construction started, and now its not even worth building as they claim "down town is dead".
This is likely the fate of that land, a write off until its so valuable they can sell it to someone else.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
Depending on things, you might enter a land purchase (or lease) contract that's contingent on issuance of a building permit.
But a seller would probably prefer to sell without contingency, so what terms are available depends on market conditions.
Title insurance for residential real estate may sometimes cover properties that are unbuildable due to unsatisfiable permit requirements.
All told, it's easier as a buyer if you purchase an existing structure that was built under permits and is currently in use under appropriate occupancy permits.
burnte 28 minutes ago [-]
SMaller business would find land already zoned for what they want. That makes it much less of a fight. These large companies find the land they want, then fight governments to allow the code and zoning changes to allow them to do what they want. It's a backwards process, but they think it's fine because they can afford it, and don't stop to realize that if they stopped letting execs make the decisions of where it goes, then a facility professional can find better land that they could get up and operational much faster.
I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.
I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.
Dig1t 20 minutes ago [-]
Yes it's called zoning, it's why we have a housing shortage in the USA. It makes building new things nearly impossible. It's also why none of the homes in Los Angeles that burnt down in massive fires a few years ago are being rebuilt, and likely won't be rebuilt for decades (if at all).
4 hours ago [-]
delusional 6 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell Microsoft hasn't purchased the land yet. It's apparently owned by WE energies as part of the power plant next door.
delfinom 6 hours ago [-]
Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing.
Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
Zoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc.
It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.
bobthepanda 6 hours ago [-]
Also for a large enough utility hookup you will need to coordinate with the utility and or government since you can’t just plop down a large consumer on any old power line or pipe.
3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago [-]
Notably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.
pathartl 4 hours ago [-]
It's about 15 miles north. Microsoft is already building a data center on some of the land that Foxconn didn't use
4 hours ago [-]
delecti 7 hours ago [-]
My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
manarth 7 hours ago [-]
That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size.
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
nixgeek 6 hours ago [-]
Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end.
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
> Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end
So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?
manarth 5 hours ago [-]
40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's!
TIL.
dnnddidiej 3 hours ago [-]
10 micro-Russias
400 vaticans
cyberax 3 hours ago [-]
The density of modern racks makes me wonder why they would want so much space. There's just no way to power all of that.
Storage? Even that is now ultra-compact.
gottorf 35 minutes ago [-]
They're called hyperscalers for a reason.
dogcomplex 10 minutes ago [-]
It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.
jubilanti 7 hours ago [-]
I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia.
LeFantome 6 hours ago [-]
us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each.
So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.
Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
nixgeek 5 hours ago [-]
AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA.
I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…
All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.
James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —
Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
CPLX 2 hours ago [-]
> Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
gottorf 30 minutes ago [-]
> The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
tptacek 22 minutes ago [-]
The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
mapt 6 hours ago [-]
Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.
jeffbee 7 hours ago [-]
Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.
badlibrarian 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bigdick1 6 hours ago [-]
My data center is bigger than yours.
sterlind 5 hours ago [-]
it's not the size of the chip, it's the motion of the digitalocean.
marticode 7 hours ago [-]
Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web.
(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.
pocksuppet 41 minutes ago [-]
Just host the site. Are you expecting to get DDoS'd? Why? And what will be the consequences if you are?
Someone said it's like protecting yourself from stabbings by banning kitchen knives, but it's more like protecting yourself from stabbings by wearing thick rubber armor at all times, that also happens to be filled with spy cameras somebody else owns. It's a bit of an overreaction to a very rare threat, don't you think?
somenameforme 5 hours ago [-]
The site's also blocked for me, also on a normal residential IP. Making your site inaccessible for people out of fear that somebody might make it inaccessible for people feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded.
Alive-in-2025 4 hours ago [-]
occasionally a major site that I subscribe to blocks me with cloud flare. It was either nyt or a similar news site I subscribe to. I couldn't even get to any 'give me feedback' page because cloudflare was blocking. When cloudflare decides to block you, it should give you a contact page for that website so you can send them an email or tell them.
I work around this by using my phone connection with phone chrome.
dantillberg 4 hours ago [-]
> feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded
I think this is a poor analogy, unnecessarily politicizing the topic.
It might be a good analogy the other way around, if hackers DDOSed the website as revenge for partial IP-based blocking, in order to apply pressure to the website operator to remove IP-based blocking. But that wasn't the topic.
pocksuppet 2 hours ago [-]
It's accurate. The USA is doing "Iran can't blockade the strait if I blockade the strait!" and Cloudflare is doing "Hackers can't take your site offline if I take your site offline!"
expedition32 5 hours ago [-]
The internet is killing itself.
And no I do not blame small website owners they just have to live with this mess same as everyone else.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
The better solution to blocking entire continents is probably doing nothing.
For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.
sethops1 3 hours ago [-]
> tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet
Are we getting that before or after personal jet packs, flying cars, and my tacos delivered via tacocopters?
I'll protect my sites with Cloudflare until then, thanks.
warkdarrior 4 hours ago [-]
> For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.
As a small website owner, I can use Cloudflare or I can wait for this imagined tech.
lstodd 3 hours ago [-]
You can use CF and lose relevance. Or even go beyond that and outright geoip-block .
Ofc it's your choice.
For some reason there are many small sites I have no problem visiting and then there are those CF users which may or may not work at any given moment, forcing me to ignore them.
Well, good luck. You are cutting yourself from the internet, not cutting me off.
Gander5739 23 minutes ago [-]
You can use CF and lose, say, 10% of your audience (number pulled from thin air). Or you can not use CF, be taken down by scraping bots or a dos attack or whatever and lose 100% of your audience.
exe34 4 hours ago [-]
Would IPFS need to be a part of the browser? Or is there an easy to use browser out there that runs on IPFS? If you need the average user to go find proxys, it won't work.
sandeepkd 3 hours ago [-]
Makes me wonder if the company protecting against the DDOS would have motivation to encourage or facilitate the DDOS efforts too, makes them the protection racket itself.
If DDOS is really the problem we want to solve then it would be awesome if one can do it without looking into the packet. SSL terminating at some centralized third party provider is way too much power.
deely3 5 hours ago [-]
And don't forget about kids safety!
bshaughn 3 hours ago [-]
Websites should have a lean markdown or .txt page for each human friendly webpage. A lot of the surge in bots is because of LLMs. Its insane that a technical documentation web page can use 200MB + of memory, when the core information I care about is << 1 MB of text. at the path of least resistance for many people is to have claude code hit 20 of such pages.
This is something that would be perfect for cloudflare to host and sell as a service - static web pages via their CDN network.
I do not work in web development, so im sure there are plenty of details im ignorant of, but the TLDR of "how to fight accidental DDOS because of AI tooling " is make it easier for them to get the content they want.
PunchyHamster 5 hours ago [-]
nah they will be selling their service to both hackers and their targets
sph 4 hours ago [-]
How many small websites served by Cloudflare risk being DDOS'd? How many small website owners would incur serious loss of livelihood if they are DDOS'd for a few days?
Is DDOS risk so important that the web needs a protection racket?
> If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence
DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.
Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.
> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
How do you not even see the irony of this?
ivanmontillam 4 hours ago [-]
> DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.
You can be absolutely destroyed if your hosting provider later hits you as a Website Owner with an excess traffic bill.
pocksuppet 2 hours ago [-]
Fire your provider then. They're probably not paying for inbound traffic (most orgs are billed on the dominant traffic direction, so inbound for eyeballs and outbound for hosting), so it's pure extortion on their part.
lstodd 3 hours ago [-]
While it is entirely possible to enter such a contract with a provider, it is your fault in the end. Don't maybe enter them?
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
> Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.
I'm not exaggerating, I'm just playing what if. That's a game where you think of random things that could go wrong, and then deciding if it is worth the expense. Just because maybe you can't think of things of varying plausibility does not make me exaggerating. We already see ransomware working from the hacker's perspective. There's no reason to think that greed will not come into play. If I can think of it, there's no reason to think that hackers are not also considering various ways to expand on ransomware as a service
>> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
> How do you not even see the irony of this?
How do you not? If every hacking group can come along and extort any site they choose to pay them a protection fee, there's no way websites will accept any of this. Compare that to paying a single legit service protecting against all of those hacking groups. Can't imagine why people would be willing to do that.
therein 4 hours ago [-]
This is the same mindset that wants to make it illegal to sell kitchen knives with sharp tips.
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
How do you come to that conclusion? It's so far off of what I said that you've got some splainin' to do
theflyinghorse 4 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why cloudflare is loved by tech people. They ARE breaking the web.
throwaway2037 34 minutes ago [-]
Real question: What is the alternative to prevent DDoS? The killer app is that their DDoS prevention is free for small sites.
isodev 6 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how after all these years, tech world still believes it's a good idea to sell the entrance to their websites and services to the same bouncer. Cloudflare not in the mood for your IP/ISP/Country? Tough cookies.
llm_nerd 5 hours ago [-]
In this case a site is geoblocking. It's an affiliate station is Wisconsin, serving up local news. Sites have been using things like MaxMind and blanket blocking entire regions long before Cloudflare.
If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.
isodev 4 hours ago [-]
This is such a narrow PoV and I don't see how it relates to Cloudflare currently being de factor gatekeeper for every web properly of consequence.
What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?
llm_nerd 3 hours ago [-]
You brought up Cloudflare, when in reality this site went into their caching services configuration and purposefully enabled geofencing restrictions. They could have done this a million ways, and Cloudflare is basically irrelevant to this conversation, and is utterly fungible.
>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible
Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.
Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.
Mickelby 4 hours ago [-]
If you run a website then you quickly learn that 99% of traffic is bots/spam/scam/ai, and will overwhelm your resources. You can block it with the click of a (Cloudflare) button. There is nothing to consider here.
not_a_bot_4sho 5 hours ago [-]
> (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
I hit this a lot with Firefox VPN and it's ridiculous
sammy2255 4 hours ago [-]
You could use a search engine to find their contact information
kogasa240p 7 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.
Posted
and last updated
VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward
“Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land.
Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback
The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties.
47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News
Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin.
The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.”
TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement:
“Nothing official has been submitted to the Village regarding their pending application, and have no comment until such time.”
- Todd Willis, Village Administrator
Resident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news.
PRESCOTT BALCH
TMJ4
Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area.
"We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said.
Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article.
"I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated.
Nancy Pierce
TMJ4 News
Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia.
Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia.
As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process.
"I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community."
"There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."
PunchyHamster 5 hours ago [-]
block was enabled by site owner, not cloudflare. If they used something else they'd just blanked block ASN IP blocks
zinekeller 3 hours ago [-]
And as stated by others, it's about not complying with GDPR et al. Heck, this is not even Cloudflare, it's AWS Cloudfront!
Symbiote 1 hours ago [-]
The site works fine from the EU.
3 hours ago [-]
dmix 3 hours ago [-]
I'd say they should come build them in Canada instead since our energy is cheaper, but anti-industrial development policy and NIMBYism is even more embedded than America, which is probably why no one is bothering.
SecretDreams 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's less this and more they're encouraged to build in America over Canada.
Danox 6 hours ago [-]
Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.
simonebrunozzi 6 hours ago [-]
Are you sure? AFAIK, Satya did a great job from the point of view of a shareholder - +1,200% from 2014 to today [0]
That was then. Today the stock is trading at a lower price than in May 2024. Google is up over 100% in that time.
shimman 1 hours ago [-]
Not that impressive when MSFT has a monopoly in several verticals that allows them to subsidize their many failures.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
They're already backtracking on, at least, the consumer Copilot being shoved everywhere in Windows. I think Nadella is already on his way out though (voluntarily). Judson Athoff is already taking over as "CEO of Commercial Businesses" so Nadella can be closer to engineering, which he's said he misses.
ralph84 2 hours ago [-]
One of the emails that came out in the Musk v. OpenAI trial was Nadella in 2022 saying he wanted to own the entire AI stack. Four years later Microsoft is no closer to owning any part of the AI stack. Complete fumble of the bag.
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
For a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands, but I guess the name fell in disuse when the Roman Empire fell...
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them.
Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.
This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
saulpw 4 hours ago [-]
If it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.
simianwords 4 hours ago [-]
The Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population).
This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.
These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.
But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.
AngryData 2 hours ago [-]
They could be used for infastructure, but when power and/or water bills go up in responce to local data centers being built it is hard to believe because power and water is infastructure and should have costs going down.
JuniperMesos 3 hours ago [-]
Taxes have relatively little to do with how good schools are, that is dominated by the quality of the students who live close enough to attend the schools.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
But a datacenter doesn’t employ that many people, compared to mines. To develop a town you need to give a bunch of people a job, build small commerces, invest in the local infrastructure, so a real local economy can sustain itself. There is none of that with datacenters
1shooner 3 hours ago [-]
Do you see coal mining towns as a model to pursue?
simianwords 3 hours ago [-]
Yes they contributed enormous growth without which USA could not have been a dominant power. There are better alternatives now however.
2 hours ago [-]
ChrisArchitect 5 hours ago [-]
(2025) OP.
jeffbee 7 hours ago [-]
Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome.
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.
I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.
If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
RajT88 2 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing a lot of pushback against data centers in my town, building where there is currently cornfields.
I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year.
Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it).
Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here.
> Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.
We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so.
So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
Given the predicted rise of Lake Michigan, and the predicted future volatility of its level, I would suggest that the cities and states of the region be building as many megascale waterworks as they can, and the energy systems to operate them. If they can get that money from data center builders, all the better.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
> provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
culi 5 hours ago [-]
Gigabit internet doesn't power startups. It powers consumer streaming. As long as you can run Zoom, you don't need high internet speeds for startups
trollbridge 3 hours ago [-]
You pretty much need low latency 1G+ to work from home these days.
weakfish 2 hours ago [-]
... do you? I have 500mpbs and both my partner and I WFH with no problems.
r_lee 4 hours ago [-]
how exactly is high speed fiber + subsidized compute a recipe for making startups?
1 hours ago [-]
parineum 5 hours ago [-]
This water usage meme needs to die. Although, it is nice to have an indicator for people who believe whatever they told without trivial verification.
jeffbee 6 hours ago [-]
I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.
3eb7988a1663 6 hours ago [-]
Surely I benefit from a host of things for which I want nowhere near me. Strip mining, petroleum refining, chemical processing, coal fired electricity, etc.
Am I allowed any autonomy or must we all accept that if a rich group wants to plop down a leather tanning factory across the street, I should have no recourse?
jeffbee 6 hours ago [-]
That's a mix of different issues. The site of a natural resource isn't one of the things that political systems control, whereas the site of a petrochemical refinery or a power station is chosen by those systems. So yes, it is obviously hypocrisy to consume petrochemical products while insisting that the refinery can't be in your "rural character" exclave with the arbitrary line drawn around it, but allowing the same facility to be built over the county line in the poorer, browner community that you consider sacrificial. Anyway, the impacts of a data center are not in the same ballpark as the other things you mentioned.
Scroll_Swe 5 hours ago [-]
I kind of agree but I live in a city in Sweden.
Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?
mindslight 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe everyone in this village already has their own local AI rig. From a technical perspective, data centers aren't providing public goods - rather they're more like attractive nuisances that foster centralized control.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
Mentioned earlier in the thread, but maybe these data centers should start providing public goods to the towns/counties in which they build? Free high speed internet, heavily subsidized compute, maybe partner with local colleges to offer labs & internships, etc.
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
mindslight 4 hours ago [-]
I agree it would help their image, but this all sounds like more corporate centralization to me. I've got a functioning electric coop that provides gigabit internet for a flat fee every month. I think they're even doing trial runs of 10Gb, but I haven't looked into it because I simply don't need it. Internet access can be a solved problem these days, where there is the political will. And if anything local colleges should be offering compute resources to the larger community, not themselves relying on scraps of generosity from commercial buildouts.
trollbridge 4 hours ago [-]
With a new data centre, your electric coop rates can go up with no benefit to you whatsoever.
jeffbee 3 hours ago [-]
In America electric rates are increasing due to 20 years of stagnation and failure to invest in transmission, and new data centers are on average associated with lower, not higher retail electric rates. This is because large consumers drive down marginal prices.
In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.
mindslight 43 minutes ago [-]
This doesn't really hold when we're talking about discrete pieces of infrastructure that may need to be built. If the current transmission infrastructure is fine for the current users, and then a new large user comes along that necessitates new infrastructure, that is a huge new cost that simply that simply didn't exist without that large user.
I believe in many areas this is the kind of infrastructure investment that regulated utilities can easily pass onto existing rate payers, which is where the problem/narrative comes from in the first place. So your theory doesn't match the actual results people are complaining about.
Same thing when datacenters take power generation into their own hands and build new gas turbines rather than solar/batteries or paying to expedite grid construction. And I'm willing to believe these problems happen in a minority of cases, but the problem is that they seemingly do happen and existing residents are left without recourse.
jeffbee 12 minutes ago [-]
Your model of the infrastructure as a perpetually sustaining asset is not correct. These assets must be continually refreshed and improved or their value disappears. The emergence of the data center as a point load has merely coincided with the existing grid infrastructure falling to pieces. The places with the highest marginal energy prices such as California are the places with the fewest data centers. Large consumers invest in transmission assets that benefit everybody.
energy123 5 hours ago [-]
One of the rare cases where nimbys can't do damage because the hyper scalers will (and are) building their data centers across MENA, South Asia and SEA where they're welcomed with generous tax breaks and incentives.
Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
expedition32 5 hours ago [-]
Welcomed by corrupt politicians perhaps the locals not so much.
Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.
866-RON-0-FEZ 4 hours ago [-]
> The data center would have been built in this scene
You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.
insane_dreamer 6 hours ago [-]
"a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good
nixgeek 5 hours ago [-]
Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor.
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of jobs during construction.
There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.
nixgeek 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, you’re right, but when the alternative is all that investment and those construction jobs AND the post-commissioning operational jobs go to a different community and a different economy, …
What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’m always a bit baffled by someone saying “Please don’t invest $5B and create 100s of jobs and taxable improvements in my back yard”.
This is a common argument: wanting 1000s of jobs during construction and 1000s of jobs after construction, but this isn’t a car manufacturing plant. That’s a “we want our cake and we want to eat it too” argument — not saying it’s your argument just that this comes up frequently.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
But what often happens is that the company is granted a ten year tax abatement in exchange for the jobs, the jobs end up being fewer than promised, and then in ten years the company closes the site and now the community has an empty industrial brownfield that was built for one thing and can't be easily repurposed.
3 hours ago [-]
jeffbee 4 hours ago [-]
It makes more sense when you realize that the same people also don't want anyone new living in their town, so they do not perceive any value to new jobs, only costs.
Danox 6 hours ago [-]
This is the last stand for Satya Narayana Nadella Copilot has to work…
Scroll_Swe 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
HDThoreaun 4 hours ago [-]
Water is a renewable resource. It actually is infinite if youre just using it to cool a datacenter, it does not disappear when youre done with it.
AngryData 2 hours ago [-]
It does if that water is being pumped from underground resevoirs that take 100s of years or more to refill then heated up and evaporated away to rain down upon the ocean or run down the Mississippi to the ocean.
I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling system maintence.
HDThoreaun 2 hours ago [-]
This is a good point and I agree it is important to place systems that use a lot of water close to renewable water resources. That being said, the vast majority of non renewable water usage goes to wasteful desert agriculture and there's comparatively very little backlash toward that. It just seems really dishonest to me to complain about datacenter water usage while ignoring the much larger source of the problem.
pessimizer 5 hours ago [-]
Libertarians turn super-woke when white privilege keeps them from doing what they want to do when they want to do it. The bad thing about just being able to steal from the blacks is that the blacks don't have anything to steal anymore.
Not being able to steal from whites as easily as you can steal from blacks is literally white supremacy actually, so to be a good ally everybody has to let Microsoft build a datacenter in their backyard. YIMBYs rule!
This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to take that long it but a real strain on the business.
So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.
Often the choices are —
1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is your example. But problematically all permitting applications are typically public record, so when you fail, the land can’t be sold on to someone else as if that didn’t happen, any sophisticated buyer will know the exact issues the city/county had with your usage. Land often transacts onward at firesale prices under these circumstances.
2. $/acre for land is bid upon at a substantial premium reflecting the future value as a datacenter, it remains under contract for potentially years pending outcome of approvals, then it transacts. Permitting being denied usually results in either no money changing hands or a small termination fee reflecting the carrying cost of the land during that period. If permitting works out the seller of land walks away very happy as the $/acre was extremely lucrative.
Of course, the businesses should be only one part of the expertise that goes into writing the laws; other experts MUST be involved, or it will indeed be a fox and henhouse situation where the fox designs the legal locks so they can always be opened by foxes...
That can be an example of model legislation but, broadly, model legislation is created by an organization for use as an example for multiple different legislatures (usually states). Everyone from think tanks, busineses, the EFF, the ACLU and PETA draft model legislation.
Storage though, yeah, that makes sense.
For simple businesses like a retail store in a location that has other retail it’s not too risky to bet that you’ll be approved, too.
For businesses with unique needs or that happen to be in the public crosshairs, you’re putting a lot at risk in the process.
The process favors big companies and developers who have established relationships and “connections” with the planning boards.
The situation is even wilder in some other countries, both more and less corrupt than the average US municipality. In some places you’re not getting a permit at all without a sizable bribe, or having an in with the planning board.
In my city one of the aspiring developers tried to run an expensive political campaign to get a family member into an office that could have helped with their approvals. People caught on and didn’t like it one iota.
So now, all of it sits abandoned, no construction started, and now its not even worth building as they claim "down town is dead".
This is likely the fate of that land, a write off until its so valuable they can sell it to someone else.
But a seller would probably prefer to sell without contingency, so what terms are available depends on market conditions.
Title insurance for residential real estate may sometimes cover properties that are unbuildable due to unsatisfiable permit requirements.
All told, it's easier as a buyer if you purchase an existing structure that was built under permits and is currently in use under appropriate occupancy permits.
I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.
I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.
Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.
It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?
TIL.
400 vaticans
Storage? Even that is now ultra-compact.
So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.
Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…
All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.
James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —
https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...
Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular.
Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.
Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.
> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular
From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.
(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
Someone said it's like protecting yourself from stabbings by banning kitchen knives, but it's more like protecting yourself from stabbings by wearing thick rubber armor at all times, that also happens to be filled with spy cameras somebody else owns. It's a bit of an overreaction to a very rare threat, don't you think?
I work around this by using my phone connection with phone chrome.
I think this is a poor analogy, unnecessarily politicizing the topic.
It might be a good analogy the other way around, if hackers DDOSed the website as revenge for partial IP-based blocking, in order to apply pressure to the website operator to remove IP-based blocking. But that wasn't the topic.
And no I do not blame small website owners they just have to live with this mess same as everyone else.
For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.
Are we getting that before or after personal jet packs, flying cars, and my tacos delivered via tacocopters?
I'll protect my sites with Cloudflare until then, thanks.
As a small website owner, I can use Cloudflare or I can wait for this imagined tech.
Ofc it's your choice.
For some reason there are many small sites I have no problem visiting and then there are those CF users which may or may not work at any given moment, forcing me to ignore them.
Well, good luck. You are cutting yourself from the internet, not cutting me off.
If DDOS is really the problem we want to solve then it would be awesome if one can do it without looking into the packet. SSL terminating at some centralized third party provider is way too much power.
This is something that would be perfect for cloudflare to host and sell as a service - static web pages via their CDN network.
I do not work in web development, so im sure there are plenty of details im ignorant of, but the TLDR of "how to fight accidental DDOS because of AI tooling " is make it easier for them to get the content they want.
> If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence
DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.
Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.
> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
How do you not even see the irony of this?
You can be absolutely destroyed if your hosting provider later hits you as a Website Owner with an excess traffic bill.
I'm not exaggerating, I'm just playing what if. That's a game where you think of random things that could go wrong, and then deciding if it is worth the expense. Just because maybe you can't think of things of varying plausibility does not make me exaggerating. We already see ransomware working from the hacker's perspective. There's no reason to think that greed will not come into play. If I can think of it, there's no reason to think that hackers are not also considering various ways to expand on ransomware as a service
>> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket
> How do you not even see the irony of this?
How do you not? If every hacking group can come along and extort any site they choose to pay them a protection fee, there's no way websites will accept any of this. Compare that to paying a single legit service protecting against all of those hacking groups. Can't imagine why people would be willing to do that.
If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.
What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?
>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible
Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.
Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.
I hit this a lot with Firefox VPN and it's ridiculous
VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward
“Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land.
Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback
The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties.
47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News
Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin.
The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.”
TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement:
- Todd Willis, Village AdministratorResident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news. PRESCOTT BALCH TMJ4 Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area.
"We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said.
Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article.
"I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated. Nancy Pierce TMJ4 News Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia.
Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia.
As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process.
"I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community."
"There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."
[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.
This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.
These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.
But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...
I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.
If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year.
Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it).
Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here.
> Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite.
We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so.
So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.
I believe in many areas this is the kind of infrastructure investment that regulated utilities can easily pass onto existing rate payers, which is where the problem/narrative comes from in the first place. So your theory doesn't match the actual results people are complaining about.
Same thing when datacenters take power generation into their own hands and build new gas turbines rather than solar/batteries or paying to expedite grid construction. And I'm willing to believe these problems happen in a minority of cases, but the problem is that they seemingly do happen and existing residents are left without recourse.
Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.
You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.
What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’m always a bit baffled by someone saying “Please don’t invest $5B and create 100s of jobs and taxable improvements in my back yard”.
This is a common argument: wanting 1000s of jobs during construction and 1000s of jobs after construction, but this isn’t a car manufacturing plant. That’s a “we want our cake and we want to eat it too” argument — not saying it’s your argument just that this comes up frequently.
I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling system maintence.
Not being able to steal from whites as easily as you can steal from blacks is literally white supremacy actually, so to be a good ally everybody has to let Microsoft build a datacenter in their backyard. YIMBYs rule!