Last month, the Anchorage Assembly passed an ordinance regulating the conditions under which AI data centers can be built in the city. To the casual observer, this probably sounds reasonable. But to read the reaction from the Editors at the Anchorage Daily News, the Assembly is in the process of sealing Anchorage’s economic fate. Grab yourself a coffee or a stiff drink, turn down that AI-generated music, and read on: this one’s a doozy.
If there’s one thing the Editors want you to know, it’s that AI data center regulation = bad. Anchorage, they write, “is already putting regulations in place on an industry that hasn’t fully landed yet. Guardrails may one day be a good idea, but we shouldn’t be setting up roadblocks before the first truck even arrives.”
First of all, holy mixed metaphors Batman – why are these trucks landing? But more troublingly, the Editors don’t seem to understand that the whole purpose of a guardrail is to prevent trucks from going off the road in the first place. Guardrails are installed by thoughtful engineers who don’t want people to get hurt. If you wait to put necessary guardrails up after the trucks have already careened off the roadway, you’re too late.
But that, bizarrely, is exactly what the Editors are calling for in regards to data center construction: build the data centers first and then sort out appropriate “guardrails” later, after the consequences have become apparent. We “cannot afford to stand around debating hypotheticals while other states move ahead,” they write, as if every aspect of data center construction and operation exists in some hypothetical and unknowable ether…