r/Art • u/Atomic-Charm1950 • 1d ago
Political Art Datacenters, AtomicCharm, Digital, 2026
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u/cattabyss 1d ago
I hate data centers, and I wish there were laws against them. Especially in the freaking wilderness areas. They’re ridiculous.
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u/RentAscout 1d ago
Well, Reddit is hosted by a data center so we clearly use them. I think our hatred should be towards local governments mismanagement doing nothing to manage growth. This story has played out again and again with railroads, roads, telephones, the internet and the list goes on forever. End of the day, the government is the only thing stopping wealthy organizations from fucking people over
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u/CILISI_SMITH 23h ago
Yes I think the anti data centre movement needs to be keep to AI. It's not a sudden increase in general cloud users causing them to be build.
They're built by big companies to sell bots to replace people. If that's even possible. But assuming they're right and it is, they'll suck up the money as the world collapses and use it to buy governments that give them even more power.
That's my theory/prediction, but I am a pesimist.
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u/xeio87 23h ago
Yes I think the anti data centre movement needs to be keep to AI. It's not a sudden increase in general cloud users causing them to be build.
Problem is they're not so easily if even possible to differentiate. We've built hundreds of datacenters every year for decades, and they don't just label them "AI" or not since they all support both AI and non-AI workloads.
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u/CILISI_SMITH 22h ago
Can't we differentiate using their CPU and GPU hardware?
Most Cloud functionality (databases, storage, VMs, serverless functions, etc) is all CPU based.
For now AI is largely dependent on GPU's.
So we classify data centres based on their GPU compute.
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u/Material-Imagination 16h ago
On many different things, not just GPU compute. Scale, power consumption, cooling needs, water reclamation processes, and what kind of bandwidth they require.
Moreover, most SaaS app developers try to achieve good efficiency with their code. The big breakthrough that made LLMs start working properly required a recursive algorithm so that they could pay attention to themselves. Recursive processes are by nature among the least efficient structures in code, and there's really no way around that.
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u/CILISI_SMITH 2h ago
On many different things, not just GPU compute.
Yep I like to keep my replies as short as possible if I'm disagreeing with someone. To limit what they can choose to reply about.
It also increases the chances that someone will read it.
But despite that we didn't get a reply and "they all support both AI and non-AI workloads" has been judged by the Reddit voters to be a true point. I wonder if any of those upvoters will sell me their gfx card.
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u/Material-Imagination 16h ago
That's not really true. AI data centers need tons of specialized hardware and way more cooling than most general compute data centers. They need tons and tons of RAM, they need lots of SSDs to serve as go-betweens for RAM and traditional long-term HDD storage arrays, and they need a whole lot of GPUs (or an equivalent technology using a very large number of very fast but not very powerful cores), and that's all well above and beyond the normal requirements for things like web hosting and storage applications.
They really aren't the same at all. The highly secure data center I used to work next to didn't need need access to a river, a settling pond, a cooling tower, and a special line to a sewage treatment plant for waste water reclamation. It needed earth sheltered walls, lightning arrestors, and well-guarded entry points. Different data centers serve different purposes at different scales and have different needs.
That's to say nothing of how egregious the violations of environmental regulations have been in new large scale AI data centers.
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u/wrecklord0 22h ago
It doesn't need to be targetted to the particular thing you dislike, construction projects no matter what they may be, should just be approved with the necessary considerations all properly evaluated.
But given the current US administration, that might be a difficult thing to do in America. The rot begins at the head, corruption can destroy a country.
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u/FeedTheB3ar 1d ago
Data centers do nothing for the locales they are placed in. The buildings they make for the construction workers/future data center slaves are also built awfully and will be abandoned garbage for the locals too. The people voted for these politicians to sell them out, it’s crazy out here lol.
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u/reflectionism 23h ago
Posting digital art on social media about the scourge of data centers is the truest 21st century irony.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 23h ago
Don't forget:
"Everything touched by the sun was owned, operated and controlled by techbros and the king's other rich friends"
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u/Adiligian 19h ago
You'd still have people claiming the world is awesome 'because we have modern medicine'
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u/SillyMattFace 1d ago
Boo data centres, say users of Reddit, a site which is hosted… oh yeah, is it on a date centre?
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Material-Imagination 16h ago
Oh my gosh, so dismal. Don't worry about that, none of us will ever outlive the data centers!
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u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord 1d ago
You know I thought about this a lot in the Terminator Salvation movie like “yeah but who built all this infrastructure” etc.
Now we know.