California residents block millions in investments for new data centers. This might actually be a good thing.

Photo above - John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson react to news that an AI data center is planned for their neighborhood . . .

Imagine your chagrin. You hire pricey consultants, spend years navigating California’s notoriously tricky permits, fees, hearings, campaign contributions and land use set asides. After years and years of spending to become LA’s single biggest landowner, you now find yourself unable to build any data centers at all. (See link below)

It was the sound bite about "biggest Los Angeles landowner" that caught my attention. It turns out to be some Australian company named HMC Stratcap. If anyone wants to build data centers, land in Australia is virtually free compared to in LA. Oz already has half-green-energy and electricity rates are a fraction what people pay in the golden state. Construction and ongoing staffing costs would be far higher in California too.

In any case, millions of dollars in consulting, planning, fees and campaign contributions are going down the drain. One of the culprits appears to be an NGO calling itself the International Data Center Authority. IDCA keeps trying to steer construction to places that don’t want them or need them. Presumably the consultants earn high fees for this advice.

Everything about IDCA is opaque. No Wikipedia page - that's always a red flag, and doesn't happen by accident. IDCA is run by some guy named Medhi Paryavi. Again, no Wikipedia page. There’s a couple of paragraphs on Linked In. Nothing about Mr. Paryavi's nationality, educational credentials, or net worth.

Mr. Paryavi bills himself as “a futurist living in the present . . . a thought leader . . . expert strategist between the logical abstraction layers of the cloud to its and possibilities . . . catering to the harmony to the world at large . . . passionate about building better lives for the citizens of the world . . . carrying the message of global harmony, peace, dialog, liberty and prosperity . . .”

That is a direct quote from Mr. Paryavi himself. He is apparently the Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi of data centers combined. But Mr. Paryavi has no Wikipedia page.

Anyway, Paryavi and his organization have been paid big bucks (and Euros, and Australian Dollars, and Riyals) for their data center advice.

If you had asked me to guess who the largest landowner in Los Angeles is, my short list would have included some government agency, or the electric company, or a real estate developer. Not some company from Australia nobody ever heard of. A company with zero profits, and trading at $2.50 a share, near its 52-week low.

I’m all for more jobs. Certainly, LA's uber drivers, baristas, and fast-food workers deserve more opportunities. But I think the protestors might have it right this time. Los Angeles some of the planet's most expensive real estate and electricity. Nobody in their right mind would agree to fork over huge plots of land for giant data centers instead of affordable housing.

I’m just sayin’ . . .



https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/you-re-a-liar-why-the-world-s-biggest-building-boom-has-run-into-a-wall-in-california/ar-AA1ZZZjG?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=69ce535f657b4a9a996c8f19896d7bae&ei=41

https://mehdiparyavi.com/about-mehdi/