Bernie Sanders calls for a pause on new AI data centers in the US

[Plutoisaplanet]

“I trust a billionaire over a politician” is also insane. Politicians are accountable (at least in theory) to voters....billionaires are accountable to no one but themselves and their balance sheets. The question isn’t who you like more, it’s who has legitimacy and checks on their power when decisions affect millions of people.

The difference is a politician is making decisions for the whole country with taxpayer money (mine), and billionaires are only using their own money and sometimes investor money. I can choose to not buy anything from a billionaire's companies. They are simply very successful private individuals. Meanwhile politicians are notoriously bad at spending taxpayer money and government debt racks up that may drastically affect my life one day. In the US federal government, they're not accountable for this debt at all right now.

First of all, you’re skipping a few steps and making some big assumptions.

AI data centers are becoming essential infrastructure because they underpin communications, finance, defense, healthcare, and government services. When a small number of private actors control the compute that everything else increasingly depends on, that’s no longer just “someone allocating their own capital,” it’s structural power with public consequences. That’s how we got here.

As I said before, local and state governments can regulate what happens in those neighborhoods. This entire article is about local externalities, and thus those governments are responsible for regulating those. Bernie Sanders is not in one of those governments, but claiming AI infrastructure is already essential infrastructure (which in it of itself is an unrelated point for regulating externalities) is a great way to enable a federal politician to bring more power to the federal government. You've even said yourself on TechSpot this year that AI is a bubble, so how can it be essential?

You're also completely wrong that it's a small number of actors that control compute. There are thousands of cloud companies in the US. Many cloud companies are just a software wrapper for infrastructure on top of Azure, Oracle, Google, AWS, and Cloudflare, but there are plenty that build and operate their own data centers including Linode, IBM, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Kamatera, Vultr, CoreWeave, Equinix, Digital Reality, Flexential, and Contabo.

In addition, there is nothing that special about the cloud (or AI) computing companies themselves. The company I work at literally operates its own data center including an HPC cluster that operates a number of different AI models (and other tasks). In fact, many cloud companies are designed to facilitate operating in a hybrid cloud environment (host some software in the cloud, and some on-premise).

 

[subnex]

Again, this has little to do with the current topic. Those tax breaks for building infrastructure come almost entirely from state or local governments. If those residents think those subsidies shouldn't exist then they can convince their representatives to axe them. There isn't even a locality mentioned in the article to discuss. That is a separate discussions about federal level regulations.

Then please tell me where the state an local governments collect the $$ from that is used on subsidies

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

Then please tell me where the state an local governments collect the $$ from that is used on subsidies

From what I just researched, money is not literally being handed to these companies. Instead, they come in the form of tax exemptions for sales and property taxes, and discounts in energy costs. So local and state taxes are simply not being collected when money is invested in the state.

Separately, some states are doing the opposite and passing laws requiring utilities to charge data centers a higher electricity rate. This addresses the main concern of local externalities. Oregon, Ohio and Georgia are three examples of this.

 

[Majin9190]

I wonder if it's because Sanders doesn't have his hand in this, is because he's complaining about it.

He used to complain about millionaires until he became one, now he complains about billionaires.

say what you want. but there is some truth to what he speaking of as far alot of people will be laid off faster then any new technology that came before ..

 

[Michiel]

Bernie's tiresome populist rambling against "billionaires" is getting old. Pretty much the single reason why the American economy is doing rather well right now (and no, it's not just the "rich getting richer", just look at some actual median income data, or unemployment numbers) is because of the AI investment boom. Billionaires don't become billionaires by stealing people's money, but by creating businessess that create value. Socialists like Bernie tend to view the economy as a fixed-size pie (which leads them to conclude that when one person gets richer, that means another person got poorer) which is just wrong. When new technologies get invented, making people more productive, the pie gets bigger. Yes often it means people with money get more money faster than people without money. But in the end you need economic growth in order to pay for all the social welfare programs and for stuff like healthcare too. America's best bet for continued economic growth is still it's technological edge over the competition. Artificially limiting the speed at which new technologies can be developed is just a good way to shoot yourself in the foot. The Chinese aren't going to limit themselves. AI is increasingly going to determine military power as well. For all it's faults, it's still best for the world (and for the US itself) that the US remains top dog and not China/Russia.