AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.

My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.

On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.

And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.

They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.

In general they just use a shitload of energy so prices go up for everyone and produce very little jobs. The worst part is that they don't generate any taxes for locals or Finland in general from services produced by datacenters there, which is very different from other industries.

They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, which also improves the energy infrastructure.

They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.

What surplus? They basically only pay property taxes and for services they buy like electricity, like any other company does. But taxes for services they produce go to Ireland. A local industry would have loads of employees and also pay much more taxes that benefits the community.

The community benefit is nowhere close and I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it is.

I'll try to find the analysis. It compared industries and showed the amount of taxes AI compute facilities pay (which is primarily in the form of property tax) relative to the cost of government services they use is the highest ratio of all industries.

This surplus is why the county with the highest concentration of data centers, which is Loudoun County, has been able to reduce its property taxes year over year. The property taxes the AI facilities pay is what enables that.