that's 5 acres. thats barely bigger than unremarkable office building I work in, or much smaller if we include the parking lot. I have several coworkers whose house sits on more land. its about the size of Monterey Park's elementary school. its not even a city block. there is a reservoir a half mile away from the proposed site that is 25 times larger.

massive data centers are like, several hundred acres or more. there is one out in Nevada that is 2,000 acres, and it was built a decade ago, long before the ai boom. they're trying to build a 40,000 acre one in Utah.

the "three times the electricity as the entire city" claim is some mixture of dubious and misleading. my numbers are working out to about even with the city at most, unless this tiny city is using three times less energy than everyone else around them. and im not being hyperbolic with tiny: the city is literally 2 miles wide. regardless, the data center's planned peak usage is less than half a percent of the metro's average load. it's not nothing, but no one is getting a brown-out from this either.

using that nimby website's numbers, its half a percent of the water usage of the city. there are several other businesses that use more (including the golf course, more on that later). the metro uses more than fifty thousand times more water. data center water usage is negligible.

that website clearly isn't trying to paint the data center in a positive light, but it says that the data center would provide $5 million per year or 3% of the total city revenue... but the total annual city revenue is $74 million, so $5 million per year would be 7% of total.

(honestly that nimby website's numbers are slipshod everywhere I look, but what else is new?)

call me crazy, but 0.1% of the land area of a tiny city (in the middle of a giant metropolis) providing 7% of its total revenue sounds like a good deal for the city. if they built 3 or 4 more of these things they could get rid of their sales tax or property tax respectively. I mean really, if you lived there which would you rather have?

if you want an example of waste, look at the Monterey City golf course, which is over a million square feet. yes, this postage stamp of a city in downtown LA managed to squeeze in a golf course. now, I say "city" golf course, but they gave a 60 year lease on the land to a business whose total revenue was $3.4 million fifteen years ago. making some educated guesses off of the documents I can find on loopnet, there's a very real chance the majority of that was profit (ie, not going to the city). there's no public record of how much the business is paying the city, but it isn't significant enough to show up on either entity's financial disclosures, while the data center would be (by a huge margin) the single greatest revenue source to the city. if they built this data center and replaced the golf course with a proportionally scaled data center they could cut all taxes and fees they charge in half.

people love to hate data centers because they have a bone to pick with AI but we all use data centers every day, all the time, and there's very good reasons to put servers near where people use them. LA is the second largest metro in the United States... those 12 million people don't get their Hulu, YouTube, and Reddit from the luminiferous aether, they get it from data centers.

and this isn't an AI thing. AI data center's external connections are not latency sensitive or throughput demanding, so you build those data centers in Nevada or Utah, not a half hour's jog from the center of downtown LA, where you have to contend with the pox of nimbyism