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Fresh Air
Who benefits when massive AI data centers come to town?

A year ago, politicians of both parties were falling all over themselves trying to attract these economic development dollars into their local communities. They were basically providing tax breaks to these very wealthy tech companies in order to get the data centers built there. But over the last six to nine months, we've just seen this huge change where people either went from being mildly positive or at least neutral towards data centers to today, 70% of Americans now say they have serious reservations about data centers.

— Fresh Air
5d ago
Fresh Air
Who benefits when massive AI data centers come to town?

The towns and counties that agree to host data centers often get tax revenue and jobs. But some researchers say that the jobs numbers are frequently inflated and that the tax breaks given to attract data centers often outweigh the benefits.

5d ago
Fresh Air
Who benefits when massive AI data centers come to town?

The towns and counties where data centers are built often give huge tax breaks to these companies. So the companies might not be paying much in property taxes. And then the data centers don't employ that many people — maybe a few dozen people to run these massive facilities.

6d ago
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Utah locals fought Kevin O'Leary's AI data center

What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together — how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark — ultimately created a political firestorm so severe it stopped Stratos in its tracks. The story is also a larger look at the AI industry's infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can't seem to spend its way out of: local democracy.

4w ago
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Utah locals fought Kevin O'Leary's AI data center

The issue with this is by the time Kevin O'Leary is talking about it on Fox in late April, MIDA has approved it. The county has not. The county didn't even know about it until about a month before this happened.

4w ago
Office Hours
The AI Boom Looks Exactly Like 1999. Here’s Who Pays. | Office Hours

The scary part is what's not in plain sight here and that is 800 plus billion is pushed off the books into shell companies. So it's hard to see who's going to eat the losses. Plus, this debt is backed by chips that can lose value overnight if a better one emerges.

1mo ago
The Prof G Pod
China Builds a Germany Every Year — And the U.S. Is Losing

Even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. So you can still have this issue where you're basically powering the entire um world's AI demand from a few centers in the US and and and a few other data centers across the world. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.

2mo ago
The Business of Tech
The Copilot engineer shaking up software development

Organizations should not have to surrender control of their code, data, and engineering workflows to use capable AI. They should be able to run and adapt these tools on their own terms.

2mo ago
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's interesting about transformers is that, unlike previous neural network architectures, the operations they do are basically fixed. A transformer from 2024 does the same operations as a transformer from 2017. So you can build a chip that is essentially a transformer, etched in silicon, and it will always be doing the most important computation in AI.

3mo ago
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The core insight is that transformers have a fixed architecture, and if that architecture is going to be with us for a long time, there's a massive opportunity to build a chip that does nothing but run transformers — and does it faster and cheaper than anything else. A general-purpose chip has to be flexible, and flexibility costs you in efficiency.

3mo ago
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really interesting about transformers is that they've kind of eaten AI. So many of the workloads that people care about are transformers. And because the transformer is a fixed algorithm, you can etch it into silicon — you can build a chip that only runs transformers, and it will be orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than a chip that can run any algorithm.

3mo ago
Diet TBPN
The Meta Compute Debate | Diet TBPN

It doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. They're signing these Neo cloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars. They're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And yeah, they can make the argument that these type of um like doing any type of NeoCloud deals themselves is just good business. It's it's just like how it's just the best way to get ROI today. It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near-term products on the horizon for Meta that are going to be able to utilize that capacity themselves.

4mo ago
The New York Times
The Hidden Cost of America's Data Center Boom

There's a lot of pressure to bring this new energy online very quickly because states are currently competing for the opportunity to attract these data centers, even though the financial benefits of them for the state has not actually yet borne fruit.

4mo ago

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