I’m requesting assistance to draft an email to our city council here in small-city-near-a-big-city Canada to help them decide to not allow an AI datacenter to be built. They said they won’t read a big long letter with citations and everything which is sort of unfortunate, because it’s what I had prepared, but I feel I’ve got to write something.
Is there a list of punchy and true reasons why a small community would absolutely not want one of these things up in Canada here in a short form? My habit of over-writing things will only hurt, so it needs to make sense to people only barely tech-literate. This is why I need help.
Background: I run a medium-sized IT firm and am very familiar with how they operate and what they entail. In fact, my company was selected to help implement the center until we saw the plans and the future scale (more than 10x) with the lack of care they envisioned and chose to back out completely.
Several data canters have been built in smaller communities in Sweden, who with the promise of jobs granted the DC operator low electricity bills and other advantages.
The jobs never really materialized, which as an IT guy makes perfect sense.
Once the DC is built and integrated in the infrastructure of the operator, 98% of all tasks can be done remotely.
You don’t really need to go into the DC and touch the servers all that often.
Indeed, in a cloud datacenter you just mark a given server as having failed and once a large enough number has, a work order is generated to replace them in a batch.
Amazon’s datacenter list leaked a while back, it’s a lot larger than you’d think and it was also very interesting how many of them are marked as totally unmanned.