Tokyo Residents Seek To Block Building of Massive Data Centre

A group of residents in Tokyo said on Wednesday they were aiming to block construction of a massive logistics and data centre planned by Singaporean developer GLP, in a worrying sign for businesses looking to Japan to meet growing demand. From a report: The petition by more than 220 residents of Akishima city in western Tokyo follows a successful bid in December in Nagareyama city to quash a similar data-centre plan. The Akishima residents were concerned the centre would threaten wildlife, cause pollution and a spike in electricity usage, and drain its water supply which comes solely from groundwater. They filed a petition to audit the urban planning procedure that approved GLP's 3.63-million-megawatt data centre, which GLP estimated would likely emit about 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. "One company will be responsible for ruining Akishima. That's what this development is," Yuji Ohtake, a representative of the residents' group, told a press conference. Global tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle also have plans to build data centres in Japan. The residents estimated that 3,000 of 4,800 trees on the site would have to be cut down, threatening the area's Eurasian goshawk birds and badgers.

I don't blame them

[rsilvergun]

there's a Bitcoin Data Center in Texas where the fans are so loud the residence are having a range of health problems. Data Centers shouldn't be anywhere near residentials unless a *lot* of money is spent on high end water cooling but nobody wants to pay for that.

Re:I don't blame them [But I do]

[shanen]

Interesting FP, cut I do blame the Japanese for the selfishness. Similar hostility towards tourists even seems to have a racist tint.

Bitcoin is a scam and calling it a "data center" if it's involved in Bitcoins is a kind of false advertising. But I'm not surprised. Everything's bigger in Texas. Especially the jackasses. (Disclaimer? Or confession? I was born there.)

Re:

[shanen]

s/cut I/but I/

Sorry, but Preview is not evidently sufficient for my weakening eyes. Sufficient reason for another hiatus?

Re:

[omen]

there's a Bitcoin Data Center in Texas where the fans are so loud the residence are having a range of health problems.

Texas does not have zoning laws, so I guess this in by design? Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

I guess your option would be to move to a place with regulations that prevent things like this.

Desert power is what you need. *nod* Frank Herbert

[Seven Spirals]

Yep. Desert power. That's what Switch in Las Vegas [switch.com] uses and so does Apple [fastcompany.com] for their data center in Reno. Solar power combined with big battery banks makes the drain on the power grid a lot more livable or simply eliminate it.

Nagareyama

[theNetImp]

I live in Nagareyama, I had no idea they had declined the datacenter. I wonder what the scope of it was. I use to work in a datacenter 20 years ago, I wonder how they have changed and what the issues were. In Nagareyama, we have all kinds of logistics buildings right next to each other next to the highway, I could see a datacenter going in there fairly easily...

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I'm trying to work out exactly where they want to build it. Akishima covers a fairly big area, including parts of the Showa-Kinen national park, which itself is right next to a JSDF airbase. It's a fairly urban area with a river... I hope they don't want to use the river for cooling. There is a golf course in the north with some industrial units nearby, maybe up there?

Data centers should meet high standards.

[Eunomion]

They don't directly contribute anything to the economy, and more often than not are just heat-generating entropy factories for crypto, AI, surveillance, and other bullshit.

Re: Data centers should meet high standards.

[paul_engr]

Yeah and you'd be right, captain obvious

Re: Data centers should meet high standards.

[_0x0nyadesu]

As usual /. comments are a parade of losers that *checks notes here* see no value in multiple world wide communications networks that facilitate communications for billions of users.

You people are insufferable hermits wasting your lives while judging how others live theirs.

Re:

[laughing_badger]

Most of those are not communications networks. Those are ways to sell the ability to manipulate people to other people to gain money. Any communication that you are doing over them is incidental to their purpose. There were pre-existing networks that were purely about communication, but those are largely gone now.

Re:

[Eunomion]

There's a lot of noise in communication, but there is a small kernel of fundamental value (in the sense of utility) that's absent in things like crypto. So I largely agree, but would add that caveat.

Re:

[cmseagle]

Roads don't "directly" contribute anything to the economy, either, which leads me to the conclusion that it's a bad yardstick. They enable all sorts of other productive enterprise, though.

so really no objections

[bloodhawk]

220 residents of 120k in the local area? pretty much any industrial building anywhere in the world has at least that many protesters. I would take that number as no objections to it.

Re:

[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

220 residents of 120k in the local area? pretty much any industrial building anywhere in the world has at least that many protesters. I would take that number as no objections to it.

Just wait until the residents get Godzilla on their side ... then watch stuff change really fast.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Under Japan's legal system, merely objecting is not enough to do anything, there has to be a legal basis. So really the number of objectors is meaningless, it all boils down to if there is a valid legal objection or not.

That said you can't assume that no other residents object, they may simply not have spoken up at this stage.

How many watts?

[jaa101]

3.63-million-megawatt data centre

So 3.63 terawatts. Japan's total average electrical usage is around 0.1 terawatts. Just 3.63 megawatts seems too small and 3.63 gigawatts too large.

would likely emit about 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year

Apparently Japan produces 0.45kg of CO2 per kWh which implies (assuming short tons) an average of roughly 410MW usage by the data centre; maybe the real usage is planned to be 363MW.

Please somewhere besides Tokyo or Osaka...

[thesandbender]

The distribution of data centers [datacentermap.com] in Japan is really unbalanced. ~65% in Tokyo metro, ~25% in Osaka and then a handful of small ones scattered along the islands. It's a problem for DR planning because Tokyo and Osaka are close enough (~400km) it's conceivable (but unlikely) they could both be taken off line. Making matters worse, providers often don't have feature/service parity between Tokyo and Osaka. A number of AWS services aren't available in Osaka for example (but they have been improving that).

Wi

Ground water?

[Misagon]

> drain its water supply which comes solely from groundwater.

That should disqualify the project by itself.
Ground water is a precious resource.

3.63-million-megawatt data centre?

[kwelch007]

Wouldn't that be 3.63 Terawatts?