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john_strinlai | on: Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers
>I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs

electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.

>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?

the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.

i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.

everdrive | parent | next
Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place.

I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)

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thurn | parent
This is basically just the normal dynamic with American tax law where tax jurisdictions are terrible at coordinating, so they end up approving things and agreeing to tax things at a very low level in order to win the competition. Even when states/counties try to work together on this stuff there's a huge defector problem, like "hey I can back out of this multistate tax compact agreement and get 500 new jobs which will let me win local reelection".

I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".