[dguest]

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.

I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:

> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.

I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?

Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

[upboundspiral]

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.

They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.

Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.

The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.

The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.

[scoofy]

I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It’s easy to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The why is the American development pattern that creates suburbia that can’t generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.

That’s the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in large part, fix the problem.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

[reactordev]

Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates.

https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...

https://archive.ph/9rY9Z

[OGEnthusiast]

IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).

[kjkjadksj]

What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.

[expedition32]

Unfortunately for the rust belt states data centers don't bring in a lot of jobs.

No well educated highly paid person wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Wisconsin will never be Seattle, Boston or NYC.

[rvba]

They dont have any negotiating power -> it is a race to the bottom

[jadbox]

Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.

[eigencoder]

Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.

When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.

[horsawlarway]

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.

If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.

Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.

---

Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?

If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.

[grayhatter]

> Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!

> why it was needed in ...

"Needed"

I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.

[b00ty4breakfast]

it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

[josefresco]

I was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply changed their minds/laws.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-county-...

> In 2016, West Jordan City sought to land a Facebook data center by offering large tax incentives to the social media giant. That deal ultimately fell through amid opposition by Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and a vote of conditional support by the Utah Board of Education that sought to cap the company’s tax benefits.

> That project went to New Mexico, which was offering even richer incentives.

> Three months after the Utah negotiations ended, state lawmakers voted in a special session to approve a sales tax exemption for data centers. The move was seen by many as another attempt to woo Facebook to the Beehive State.

So basically they first said "No", lost the bid, had FOMO so they passed new laws to attract this business.

>Asked about the identity of the company, Foxley said only that it is “a major technology company that wants to bring a data center to Utah.”

>And that vision could soon be a reality, after members of the Utah County Commission voted Tuesday to approve roughly $150 million in property tax incentives to lure an as-yet-unnamed company — that sounds an awful lot like Facebook — to the southern end of Pony Express Parkway.

Seems like a pretty open and obvious secret.

[wat10000]

I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.

[a2128]

This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?

The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying

[infecto]

What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.

[datsci_est_2015]

It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.

But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.

Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.

[tzs]

> Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?

In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.

[jjkaczor]

Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

[bparsons]

Don't give them any ideas

[Supermancho]

> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at

This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.

[JKCalhoun]

Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?

[mistrial9]

Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic abuse in siting movies and TV

[miki123211]

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

[dguest]

I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].

Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

[e40]

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

[fc417fc802]

An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.

[duped]

> Everybody wants X to exist

Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.

[infecto]

I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.

There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.

[GorbachevyChase]

I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.

[analog31]

A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.

When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.

A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.

[vasco]

Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.

So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.

[dguest]

I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".

If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.

[tokai]

But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.

[salawat]

Reputation working as designed?

[tptacek]

Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.

[buellerbueller]

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

[AndrewKemendo]

> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.

If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.

That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.

[packetlost]

This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here.

I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.

[emsign]

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:

* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

[jandrewrogers]

> use too much ground water

Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.

The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?

[zug_zug]

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

[Exoristos]

The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.

[mkarrmann]

Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid.

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

[topaz0]

In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.

[duped]

> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY

Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.

It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.

The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."

[wat10000]

It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.

[bluedino]

They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media.

Ironic.

[GorbachevyChase]

The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:

- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles

We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.

[convolvatron]

I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?