France?

[Sapper740]

That's a version of a similar deal in my area - only to add insult all the county and local councils are in a hurry to re-zone areas that would easily become single-family or townhome developments, or a mix, and put up data centers instead which bring no jobs, and force everyone's electric bills to skyrocket so the utility can build out their special power requirements.

I know a thing or two about Data Centers since I have been building, commissioning, and running them for about twenty years now. Texas has the greatest concentration of data centers in the nation and I have variously worked on or at data centers for C.B.R.E., Texas Instruments, T5 data centers, RackSpace, Raging Wire and NTT to name a few. Data centers are notoriously labor intensive to build and provide hundreds of good paying construction jobs while they are being built. Yes, running them only takes a couple of dozen or so trained technicians, network types, and support staff but that's still more than the equivalent Class A office space or even multi-family residence maintenance staff and the pay is excellent. Yes, they are energy intensive, at least the legacy DC's are but modern cooling equipment such as heat exchangers and Kyoto units and green practices have greatly reduced their energy consumption. Toyota's new North American headquarters in Plano, Texas actually produces a surplus of electricity during the day and sells approximately 50 MWhours each and everyday to the utility. State Farm's Data center stores 1,000,000 gallons of chilled water in a huge storage tank which it replenishes at night when the demand is low and then uses it during the day to keep the data center cool. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with your comment.