Reply to Why should data center hubs, like NoVA, carry a disproportionate local burden for AI, a global service?

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Reply to "Why should data center hubs, like NoVA, carry a disproportionate local burden for AI, a global service?"

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[quote=Anonymous]Datacenter person here. Datacenters cover 95% of Loudoun county's annual operating budget. They not only tax the land, but they tax all the equipment inside. A lot of that is owned by other companies, based outside VA, so VA gets taxes from them too.

Datacenters create a huge amount of construction jobs when being built. Afterwards, they employ a mix of highly-skilled IT engineers, and building engineers. These are all well-paid jobs, and datacenters are staffed 24/7 so the number of FTEs employed over the course of a month or week is reasonably high. Sure, it's not the employment per acre you'd see at a shopping mall, but it's not awful. They also don't generate much traffic compared to a mall.

As for AI, first of all, most datacenter space is used to host applications, not AI. Think thing like the billing system for your local water company, or the email for your company. About 20% of datacenter space is currently used for "AI workloads" though that will rise.

But... like with all new technologies in the early stages, AI is getting incredibly more efficient over time. We've seen roughly a 10-fold improvement in efficiency in the last 2 years. There's also a commercial reason to do so -- more efficient AI = lower costs for the companies that provide it.

As for power, datacenters pay more for power than residential customers. Dominion Power bills datacenters at Schedule 10 or GS-4 schedule rates. This gives datacenters big incentive to drive down power costs. It's why we moved to hot aisle/cold aisle setups some years ago, as it's more efficient airflow for cooling purposes.

Next on water use: the new datacenters are being built using grey or recycled water for cooling, and employing more liquid cooling. The current issue is a lot of water evaporates in the cooling process, so that's where the water is going. Loudoun Water charges datacenters the higher "Estimated Flow" rate instead of how typical residential rates work, so again there is a commercial incentive to make datacenters more water efficient.

Now imagine a world without datacenters, so everyone has to go into the office every day instead of some working from home because Zoom/etc isn't an option. During Covid lockdown, all of us in the industry still went into the office to make sure all the services you relied on stayed up and running. We all carried special documents in our cars authorizing us to be out on the roads during the 1st month of lockdown, though I never had to use it as the roads were empty of traffic enforcement.
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