I kinda had mixed feelings about the Houston government (Yes even during last summer) but I’m finally willing to accept that this guy has gotta go. This is just ridiculous, nobody wanted this.
Lmao, no he wasn't. He was the registered director of several holding corporations in Bermuda, where he lived. Literally anybody can do that for the cost of a few hundred dollars.
How are people so outraged and simultaneously so ill-informed? The confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance on this reddit since this announcement is approaching critical levels of psychosis.
Still, listed as VP of companies that were in a massive data dump with little to no filtering means someone was VP of a few off shore shell companies. Which isn't at all unusual if you are a professional accountant working in places that has offshore shell companies.
Without any particular allegation, what you are saying is that anyone involved in international finance, even doing mid-level professional services, is just inherently scandalous.
Because we need jobs, tax income and exposure to global markets.
The environmental and provincial impact will be minimal, they will generate their own power and water usage will incrementally increase 500k lpd on top of the existing 6.1m lpd draw on the lake (which has 34m lpd of safe usage)
No one can start any industry in this province without people getting upset and then wonder why we are so poor.
Thanks for replying, I appreciate getting your perspective.
Power use, they're offsetting *some* of their own use, not all for a long while. Until they do, the rest will come from the same supply we draw from NS Power, which will affect our rates, stability, and mean more coal and oil being burned until we're 100% clean.
Water, we can put the volume aside, the lake is suited. They're saying closed loop, which sounds good, but isn't really. One Meta is building in Wyoming purged 800,000g of waste water contaminated with sterilization-resistant bacteria into the city water supply recently. Anecdotally, anyone who's built a water-cooled computer can tell you how easy it is to get an outbreak, how badly they can fuck up your loop, and how nasty they can get.
Jobs are minimal. Construction at the start, then all they need is security and maintenance. They're big warehouses filled with GPUs running 24/7; the only people working there are swapping burnt-out GPUs. AI data centers need about 0.0002 FTEs per square foot, so about 40 permanent jobs for the 200,000 square foot phase 1. For perspective, a Superstore employs ~0.0025 FTEs per square foot, so the ~130,000 sqft Joe Howe location employs about 325 people.
Tax income, sure... IF it's profitable. Anthropic had $4.5b in revenue last year... and lost $8b doing it. Corporations are already moving away from AI due to costs, and that's while paying $1 for $3-4 of compute. We'll get payroll and property taxes up until the thing shutters.
Global markets, I'm with you, though this project and the company behind it ain't it. NS doesn't have any inherent advantages that make us better suited for producing tokens at scale, or at least not until we're generating more wind power than we can produce. The company itself, Everwind, is pivoting to data centers because its original plan to produce green hydrogen to ship to European markets has collapsed. That project was destined to be a boondoggle from the start, even if balcony solar and white hydrogen hadn't made it moot. I don't think we should be getting even deeper in to business with those fucks.
I'm not against progress. I'm against bad decisions. We've made a lot of them in the past, and this one smells a lot like those.
This project is only going to provide around 200 permanent jobs. There are substantial execution risks with this project, and the developer hasn't even finished the wind farms for their hydrogen plant yet, so how are they gonna power a data centre? Seems shady.
You have it backwards. We are poor because industries see us as a backwater wasteland full of dumb hicks that will take any low-wage body-breaking job because there's no other options. They can pay the lowest wages in the country, pay no taxes and the lowest royalties in the country, destroy ecosystems and people, and then leave the community to deal with the cleanup. The people who have wisened up to this after decades of it happening in this province are not why we're a poor have-not province
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u/DarkKnightTazze Nova Scotia 17h ago
I kinda had mixed feelings about the Houston government (Yes even during last summer) but I’m finally willing to accept that this guy has gotta go. This is just ridiculous, nobody wanted this.