40 mayors worldwide endorse a pact to shape data center development
Forty mayors from around the world have signed onto a pact announced Tuesday to try to shape how urban data centers are built and operated.
It’s their vision for how urban data center development can be done sustainably — and not at the expense of their cities’ natural resources, energy prices or climate targets. C40 Cities, an alliance of nearly 100 cities seeking to impact climate change, launched it during London Climate Action Week.
Many new data centers are coming to rural areas for cheap land. Experts at C40 say metropolitan areas are under tremendous pressure too, with about 1,700 data centers located in their network of cities so far. Development of data centers is expected to grow by over 40% in 50 of those cities.
C40 got involved because the mayors of Phoenix and Melbourne, Australia, came together over worries about data centers using a lot of their cities’ electricity and water, and competing with housing developers for available land.
“We found out that the challenges in every region around the world were very similar,” said Cassie Sutherland, a managing director at C40. “Our approach was to say OK, how do we now use a global mayoral voice to come together with the conditions under which they will accept data centers.”
Data centers are built in cities to be close to firms that want systems powered by artificial intelligence to respond instantaneously. Major companies locate data centers in cities to be near their business operations. And data centers tend to be built in clusters, forming ecosystems in metropolitan areas that might outweigh factors like land costs. It’s just more recently that data centers have moved out into rural areas, said Andrew Batson, global head of data center research at JLL.
Political and local opposition has been growing because of fears about blackouts, rising electricity bills and the centers’ voracious water needs. Some states are suspending tax breaks or considering moratoriums on data center construction.
Ugh. I'm sick of the reporting on data centers! There's only one (realistic) concern when it comes to data centers and it's this: Power consumption.
Everything else is either myths (e.g. water usage) or minor points that may or may not bother the locals (using up land that could've been a farm or a school or whatever).
Also, there's many kinds and sizes of data centers! Consider for a moment that nearly every school or modern business has a data center of some kind in their building(s). You have to put those servers somewhere!
People talk about data centers like the world just collectively decided that every single one that's ever built from now until the end of time will be as big as an airport and use up more power than a small city. That's not reality! Most data centers are just small portions of a larger business campus.
Yet now we're trying to regulate something so common and necessary that is going to pointlessly increase the costs of everything for everyone. Stop for a moment and think about it:
If we want to actually do the right thing when it comes to data center regulations there's really only one thing to be concerned about: Power usage. It's also really easy to fix!
We just need a regulation that requires all data centers over a certain size to be powered via renewable energy. BAM! Problem solved.
It's just that no politicians have the guts to force such a thing and that too drives me nuts!
Solar is already the cheapest power generation option and there's plenty of space (in the US) to install more than enough solar panels to power all the data centers in the world (really, we have so much space!). Also, data centers can be anywhere! That AI video generation service could be out in the middle of the desert in Nevada and it wouldn't have an impact on the user experience in the slightest... Even if the user was in Australia (on the other side of the world)!
While I agree, the reality is space constraints. Renewables take a lot of space (mostly solar) and data centers benifit from sharing resources. The reason northern Virginia is such a magnet for them is that box was opened 2 decades ago and they get to share resources, your house pets like to sit around the warm things dont they?
The regulatory failure is that data centers are not treated like the heavy industrial buildings that they are. Foundries take a cartoonish amount of resources to run, but you dont see towns letting them set up shop near homes. Furthermore, almost no data center gives themselves the space to run the generators and not violate half a dozen ordanences, because they either run twice a year for testing (fines are the cost of doing business) or are on 24/7 because the grid cant handle their demands. Its the latter group where the managment needs to be drawn and quartered.
My proposed regulation would be that new buildings have a land requirment based on the amount of power they intend to consume (not what is provided from the grid, they can make their own power if needed). This would force hyperscaler build outs (who already have more money than sence because these are rush jobs for AI nonsense) to buy land buffers around their noisy polluting buildings. In theory, it would protect residents better and would curb the worst of the proposed plans, like that BS in Utah.
Both our ideas require legislators and relgulators to get off their asses and sharpen their axes, and of all the things discussed, that seems the most unrealistic unfortunatly...