This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.

> After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades

What? A quarter of EU expenditure is spent on agricultural subsidies, i.e. directly paying people to be farmers.

1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.

2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.

If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.

Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).

The EU is an agricultural union with a bit of other stuff sprinkled on top.

Yeah, but they do produce food which data centers do not. This is an odd argument to make.

Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive, so we can say it's worth it. Datacenters don't.

They don't even create that many jobs like a factory for instance so we can say the mass employment offsets the environmental damage.

Is it inherent to the architecture of LLMs/GenAI or rather is it because VCs fund what they can capture and others can't fund?

Italian farmers pay effectively 0% taxes on land and the areas are quite poor. Data centers on the other hand pay lots of taxes.

Why would they ban productive uses of land?

at some point the additional tax revenue outweighs the downsides

This method works better in a free market. Instead of outright banning things, you simply build a system that encourages/disencourages specific things and it basically runs on autopilot.

> blocking the future won't play out nicely

What does that even mean?

> But blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

Maybe find scalable alternatives or software optimizations that do not require the worlds energy or building even more data centers everywhere and further burning up the planet?

So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.

Pretty sure blocking it will work perfectly.

wow, I'm so excited for this "future" where everyone is laid off and miserable

As an Italian, I second that this is clearly a populist manoeuvre. Nobody in their sound mind would ever build a big datacentre in Northern Italy, the energy costs are way to expensive. There is no untapped hydro power available, fossil fuel is obviously always going to be more expensive than elsewhere, no nuclear power and you can't roll in a massive solar array with batteries due to how cramped the Po Valley already is. It would ironically make more sense to build it in Southern Italy, where once the political issues are sorted out, the access to wind and solar power are way easier and there are a lot of underdeveloped areas.

But yes, in general Italy (or Europe, maybe except France or Northern Europe with hydro power) isn't the best place to build data centres.

> blocking the future won't play out nicely for Italy or Europe in general.

I think you're somewhat misunderstanding how things in Italy have been working for the better part of the last 2 decades. I am 95% certain that this measure was passed *precisely* because it had zero concrete political downsides. Italian political culture thrives in draconian or purely populist measures that end up being absolutely irrelevant or unenforced (with some terrible miscalculation every once in a blue moon, see the closure of nuclear power plants). You ban something, you get the political clout of doing that, and then nobody actually checks whether the government ever attempted to enforce that law, or that nobody was going to do it in the first place.

Trust in me when I say, if building datacentres in Italy were economically sound nobody would have wanted to pass this measure

You speak of the future as if it were some certain inevitable thing.

The future is what we as humans decide it to be.

Many humans don't like this vision of the future, where we burn our planet so as to concentrate even more power in the hands of the super wealthy. This is them shaping their own future.

Just had to read few more paragraphs : "the use of disused former industrial areas is favoured. In this case there are no additional burdens, but rather the law proposes bureaucratic simplifications."

It's even in bold "the use of disused former industrial areas"

>Like next to residential area?

or... industrial areas?