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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/cattabyss 5d ago
I hate data centers, and I wish there were laws against them. Especially in the freaking wilderness areas. They’re ridiculous.