Politics
Amazon Sends $1 Billion Apology Note After Parking A Server Farm Next To Your Kid's School
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
Amazon announced Tuesday that it would invest $1 billion in communities hosting its data centers, a gesture the company described as a "commitment to shared prosperity" and which county commissioners in four states described, off the record, as a fruit basket delivered to a house the company had already driven a bulldozer through.
The pledge comes after a sustained and increasingly loud backlash against data center proliferation across the United States, where Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been quietly acquiring parcels of land in small towns and replacing whatever was there, often farmland, sometimes parks, in two cases a community swimming pool that had been open since 1967, with buildings the size of aircraft hangars that run twenty-four hours a day and require roughly the same amount of electricity as a mid-sized country.
The $1 billion will be distributed through the Amazon Community Benefit Program, which is administered by Amazon, reviewed by Amazon, and approved by Amazon, making it the most efficiently operated government in the country.
Jeff Bezos did not comment. Andy Jassy did. In a statement released alongside the announcement, Jassy said the program reflected Amazon's belief that "communities are our most important infrastructure." He did not address why the most important infrastructure was the last thing the company thought about, or why a billion dollars became available the same quarter the zoning complaints started generating national coverage.
At a town hall in Culpeper, Virginia, one of the most data-center-dense counties in the world and a place that did not vote for this, a resident named Donna Schreiber asked an Amazon representative whether the company had considered that her property value had dropped eleven percent since the facility next door came online. The representative said Amazon was "deeply committed to dialogue." Schreiber asked what that meant. The representative said it meant Amazon was "listening."
Amazon currently operates or has approved data centers in communities across Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Texas, Oregon, and Georgia. Each one draws between 20 and 150 megawatts of power, strains local water supplies for cooling, and generates a noise complaint rate that local governments have taken to logging in a spreadsheet called, in Fauquier County, Virginia, "The Hum."
The $1 billion works out, across the estimated affected population, to approximately $47 per person. For context, a one-year Prime membership costs $139. Amazon has not offered affected residents a discount.
The company said grant applications would open in the second quarter. Communities will be asked to submit a proposal describing how the funds will be used, a letter of support from local leadership, proof of Amazon data center proximity, and a statement confirming that the applicant understands the grant does not constitute an admission of any impact, liability, or noise.
That last part is not a joke. It is in the application guidelines.
Amazon broke ground on eleven new data centers last month.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-pledges-1-billion-for-data-center-communities-as-us-backlash-grows-12515431