#793: China Is Funding The War On Data Centers with Sam Lyman

And for any of the people who may be in the 71 percent of poll respondents who would not want to.

live next to a data center who may be listening to this.

I think it's important to to go over like the low hanging FUD and debunking like water usage is like that for context for anybody who's listening to this doesn't know like I sit on the board of a data center company historically.

We've done Bitcoin mining in the TVA.

We've been in the TVA for six years now, five or six years.

And so I know this problem intimately and funnily enough, as you mentioned with your story, right on the Bitcoin mining front, we've been fighting these battles for many years, but like water usage is one like the people are commonly referencing some research report that was done over a decade ago and over exaggerated the water usage of data centers back then by something like 10,000%.

And so people are running with a bad research report and saying it's using so much water.

It's closed looped water systems.

It's not using that much water at all.

Sound is another one.

Yes, Bitcoin mining had its problems, and it's not like these things don't make any sound, but that is a problem that is solvable.

And then at the end of the day, are they raising electricity prices? And I can say for certain, at least for the data centers that we operate, we know for sure, because the utility companies that we work with have told us, and they've gone to public city council meetings and explicitly said this, because we're buying their excess capacity, they've been able to hold rates down for two years straight because we're there as a buyer of first and last resort.

And so the FUD is real, it's loud, but it's obnoxiously wrong in many regards.

It's

a good way of putting it.

Yeah, it's unfortunate too, because it's put the data center industry in a posture of defense.

I think for the last several months, data centers have been trying to explain to communities how they won't hurt their communities, which is a fairly easy case to make.

But even after you've made that case, I think data centers need to go a step further in explaining how they can actively help communities too.

And I think that's another story that's not really being told.

No, it's simple things too.

I think the, and you've run the numbers.

There's plenty of stories that have been coming out as I think it's a bit of a lag effect, but the, I think the industry or parts of the industry at the very least have been jolted awake.

Okay.

We need to get better at narrative forming and really telling the story.

But if you look at some historical data centers from like microsoft or amazon in the towns that they they've entered particularly in the northwest and they've been there for decades like the turnaround that these towns have had because the data centers are paying property taxes and sales taxes on electricity that have enabled these small towns that were that were sort of hollowed out before data center came in you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over over many years that allow them to build roads, build schools, build football fields, hospitals, whatever it may be.