Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
(I know it’s not the point, but a reminder that data center climate impact, including heat, is nowhere near flight, agricultural waste, or construction. Hate it for its own reasons, not for fake ones.)
It’s easier to bitch about the woes of a thing I already don’t like than to have to make any effort in changing my habits, mmkay?
Hi I can explain the difference. The three other things you listed are necessary for a multitude of reasons. The current boom in data centers is for a solution in search of a problem wasting shit for no gain to humanity as a whole.
Hope that helps :3
Also the scariest part of this datacenter inflation is how much of these new data centers are going to be abandoned within the next 5 years when the AI bubble pops and suddenly the companies spending like crazy on datacenter growth need to cut back. There’ll be lots of big empty buildings outside of small towns costing taxpayers a ton of money, much like when any big box store closes up shop. You can either spend a ton of money tearing it down, a ton of money rebuilding it into something useful, a ton of money attracting another business which may or may not front the cost for remodeling the space or a ton of money maintaining the empty property so it doesn’t fall over and become even more of a blight. There’s no winning for these small municipalities that just get used and abused by large businesses
? Massive GPU server racks are relatively easy to repurpose for several things. The most likely (if sad) is crypto mining, but there’s also expensive weather simulations, cloud gaming, video hosting, etc.
Requesting a source that these centers are hard to repurpose. I find myself pretty skeptical. Computers are generally multipurpose and easy to swap tasks on.
Is there enough demand for thousands of servers with purpose built ARM processors (which may or may not have any publicly available kernel support) driving 4-8 600w a pop Nvidia datacenter chips though? Yes some will be repurposed but there simply won’t be the demand to fill immediately. Realistically what will happen is companies operating these datacenters will liquidate the racks, probably liquidate some of the datacenters entirely and thousands of servers will hit the secondhand market for next to nothing. While some datacenter structure city empty and unmaintained until they’re either bought up to be repurposed, bought up to be refurbished and brought back into datacenter use of torn down, just like an empty Super Walmart location
Some of the datacenters will be reworked for general compute, maybe a couple will maintain some AI capacity, but given the sheer quantity of compute being stood up for the AI bubble and the sheer scale of the bubble, basically every major tech company is likely to shrink significantly when the bubble pops, since we’re talking companies that currently have market caps measured in trillions, and literally a make up full quarter of the entire value of the New York Stock Exchange, it’s going to be a bloodbath.
Remember how small the AI field was 6 years ago? It was purely the domain of academic research, fighting for scraps outside of a handful of companies big enough to invest in am AI engineer or two on the off chance they could make something useful for them. We’re probably looking at a correction back down to nearly that scale. People who have drank the coolaid will wake up one day and realize how shit the output of generative AI is compared to the average professional’s human work
Growing inefficient cattle crops in a desert to preserve water rights: not necessary.
Flying Coast to coast for a business meeting that could be an email: not necessary.
Manufacturing those cheap scissors that break after 2 uses: should be a crime (not necessary).
All of these subcases have comparable emissions and externalities to the data centers (at least by my fermi estimates).
Yeah, the main problems right now, seem to be electricity consumption, causing price hikes in surrounding areas.
Its not just electricity but also water consumption, and noise pollution if not particulate pollution too.
They provide little benefit to the surrounding communities with very few jobs by design and just consume local resources at usually discounted bulk rates to sell a service that possibly nobody locally would be in the market for
I have said this before somewhere, but this feels like something that would be very well suited for places where electricity prices have gone extremely low due to “too many solar panels”.
Also, in places with excess geothermal output etc.
What are these companies really basing their installation locations upon?
I know at least a few HPC folks talking about building their datacenters far north, where cooling can be done by opening a window.
Which feels to me like terrible policies still. Make big projects pay their costs please!
It’s a bit different in this case.
The responsibility of providing electricity falls onto the nearby power plant, which then also has to increase their production.
But the maker of the new electricity consumer does not need to pay for the capital or anything else really, apart from the electrical rates (and some minimal fixed rates) that they are using.
Some governments are coming up with interesting, seemingly effective regulations, though.
What type of regulations are we talking, or at least which country’s?
Yeah, but the average Lemme/Redditor is not going to waste an opportunity to pretend caring, pointing his/her finger and accumulate fake internet points.
I do feel obligated to at least expose folks to numeracy, even if they won’t listen. Hope it’s not giving them a repeated trauma somehow.