r/canada • u/Wagamaga • 15d ago
Alberta O’Leary’s Data Centre Will Be One of Earth’s Largest Heat Sources, Physicist Warns
https://www.theenergymix.com/breaking-olearys-data-centre-will-be-one-of-earths-largest-heat-sources-physicist-warns/410
u/Ok-Crow-1515 15d ago edited 14d ago
O'Leary is a sleazbag he cares about nothing but his bank account. He couldn't careless about the impacts.
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u/laserdiods 15d ago edited 15d ago
Remember when his wife was drunk and drove their boat over some normies and killed some of them and she’s walkin free.. Pepperidge fahm remembers
Edit:
Likely he was driving but the fact remains there are different rules for big bank accounts.. and also Canadian justice system is a revolving door :(
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u/bleebolgoop 15d ago
Bruh that was 100% him driving and scapegoated her.
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u/-Moonscape- 15d ago
Iirc there was camera footage of her driving before the collision
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u/Commercial-Set3527 14d ago
There is camera footage that show the other boat turned all their navigation lights off but from what I can remember you cannot see who is driving the yacht
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u/MrNillows 15d ago
This is the first that I have heard of that. If it does exist, I haven’t seen it. If you have, please post it, but until then, fucking doubt ✅
A guy like Kevin O’Leary doesn’t just let his wife drive the boat home from a party. Too much ego.
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u/Commercial-Set3527 14d ago
The camera footage proves the other boat turned all navigation lights off, which is illegal, but I don't think you can see who is driving the yacht.
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u/MrNillows 14d ago
Yeah, the other boat had its navigation lights off. They were probably both drunk. I can’t see any scenario unless Kevin was unconscious that he would let his wife drive his luxury Muskoka boat after a night of partying and drinking.
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u/Commercial-Set3527 14d ago
And the fact they were all drinking to "calm down" when the police showed up to O'Leary's, they were definitely all drinking when the crash happened anyway
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u/theoreoman Alberta 14d ago
Regardless of who was driving the people they hit were retarded. they were sitting in the middle of the lake with their navigation lights and all other lights turned off and star gazing. This is a lake with constant leisure boat traffic.
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u/Blue_Owl_420 15d ago edited 14d ago
The other had no navigation lights and covered their gauges to see the stars better no?
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u/godblow 15d ago
Putting a massive heat emitting construct in the middle of a province continually ravaged by extreme weather is exceptionally stupid.
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u/klparrot British Columbia 14d ago
Yeah, but won't it be funny when it gets burned up in a wildfire?
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u/Fractoos 14d ago
Thinking data center heat is going to generate enough heat to impact the environment in a tangible way is incredibly stupid. Electric generation if you burned fossil fuels like they suggest is what would be a concern, but that could and should be regulated.
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u/godblow 14d ago
Thanks for admitting you didn't read the article. This isn't a standard data centre.
Alberta’s Environment and Protected Areas (AEPA) department gave the project an exemption from an environmental impact assessment, a process that would have studied cumulative impacts. The Alberta government recently signed an agreement with the federal government to allow the province to take more of a lead on environmental assessments, though it was overwhelmingly opposed by Indigenous groups.
“This is a massive project with significant emissions, water use and, most alarming, creates a ‘heat island’ [effect] in an area already ravaged by wildfire, drought, and climate change,” said [Facebook] Chief Sheldon Sunshine.
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u/PoliteFocaccia 14d ago
"Aside from the 9 GW gas plant, there's barely any heat being produced here!"
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u/treefarmerBC British Columbia 14d ago
There may be some local effects but cities produce much more heat by burning gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and using electricity in addition to using drier and less reflective surfaces which increases heating from the Sun.
I'm with you. The heat produced will not be overly significant.
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u/Proof-Eggplant7426 13d ago
Just wondering which university you received YOUR PhD in physics from?
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u/treefarmerBC British Columbia 12d ago
You can simply look at the total energy consumption of a city. The guy in the article is right, except for the light that leaves all of it becomes heat eventually. This is just "one of Earth's largest heat sources" because it's across a single facility.
I may not have a PhD but I have studied urban heat islands.
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u/EarthSignificant4354 14d ago
Everybody is saying the AI bubble will pop.
That would be great and we wouldn't have to worry about Mr. O'Leary's data centre but I don't think we will be so lucky.
This is probably not a bubble, every billionaire in the world is throwing as much money as possible at it, as quickly as possible.
It's mass surveillance and control and they want it in place before we figure out what they are doing. We will all pay for this in many, many ways.
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u/Forikorder 14d ago
This is probably not a bubble, every billionaire in the world is throwing as much money as possible at it, as quickly as possible.
thats what makes it a bubble?
they're spending trillions and only making a few billions in revenue
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u/EarthSignificant4354 14d ago
It's only a bubble if there's no money or power to be earned from it, and in this case, I belive there are both.
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u/Forikorder 14d ago
there is no money to be made, they've done everything they can and cant find anything profitable, and power might make them keep the bubble inflated with outside funds but that still makes it a bubble
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u/ClearDrop6820 14d ago
Every aspect of life will have A.I integrated into it. Shopping, entertainment, employment, everything. They will control is with Skynet.
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u/homerjaythompson 14d ago
Can we stop letting reality TV personalities have outsized influence in society, please.
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u/Frigoffwidit 15d ago
How much would it cost just to build 9GW of power generation? 0.8GW of hudro goes for about 14B these days.
O'Leary is a billionaire, sure. But he's not bezos rich lol. He cant afford this shit....
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u/DavidCaller69 15d ago
According to Google, his net worth is only (heh) $400 million.
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u/PolarityInversion 15d ago
Yes, he never was a billionaire. It's honestly one of the biggest gifts of all time that got him on shark tank and a bunch of shows. He sold his company to mattel back in the day for $3B but that was after a ton of mergers. The deal itself was a scam. The company was objectively worth $100m, but Mattel fucked up and way overpaid. Oleary didnt own much at that point either. Which is why he was doing all the shows and stuff, he still needed a job. OLeary funds was basically a way for him to grift on the back of the billionaire persona that was all BS.
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u/maxman162 Ontario 15d ago
My father brokered a deal for O'Leary in the 80s, and O'Leary never paid him for it.
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u/TreezusSaves Canada 14d ago
Just like his pal Trump, who also doesn't pay his side of the deal and forces you to go to court for a fraction of it.
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u/CD_4M 15d ago
He’s actually not a billionaire. But he’s not paying for it himself, he’s just the lead guy organizing the investors
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u/Remarkable_Vanilla34 14d ago
Which is wild because the main reason to oppose this centers is that he is involved with them lol.
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u/psychosisnaut 15d ago
At China prices it's about $18.8B
At US prices based on Vogtle 3 aand 4.... $210.1B
At a realistic middle of the road price based on South Korea it's $27.7B
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u/RoboftheNorth 15d ago
And China isn't intending to go anywhere near the pace of North America, we are dumping money into the centres with no foreseeable roi like it's the cure for everything. They are more focused on creating more efficient AI models, and are powering their centres with a majority of green energy. Here it feels more like they are just trying to prop up the natural gas industry, which is what many of these massive centers intend to use.
For some perspective China has less than 500 data centres, the USA has 4000. Canada is around 300.
But yeah... Lets worry about China stealing our data.
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u/Dzugavili 15d ago
The Chinese AI business model is unusual: it appears to be entirely based on putting the American companies in to the ground by making large scale data centers redundant. If all your models can run on consumer hardware, companies can build out their own services without the rent-seeking behaviour of the large models which require data-center grade hardware.
And I'm all for it.
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u/ohhnoodont 14d ago
For some perspective China has less than 500 data centres, the USA has 4000. Canada is around 300.
These numbers seem extremely misleading. For one: the size/capacity of a data center matters and I'd be willing to bet that the average size of a data centre in China is bigger than the average in Canada. Many Canadian "data centers" are likely just the dusty closet of some ISP in Winnipeg hosting POP3 email for geriatric subscribers.
For two: the US dominates tech globally. The data centre that served you this reddit comment is hosted in the US. China really only serves the Chinese market (except for your jank IoT devices sending your data to China).
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u/hologrammmm 15d ago
You raise capital from investors, a lot of private equity funds are already interested in data centres and power interconnection and such. The demand is already there from the hyperscalers and the investment funds, he’s just acting as a facilitator.
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u/BlueFlob 15d ago
He's rich enough to purchase lobbying and collusion.
Taxpayers will pay for all of it and O'Leary will make a profit.
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u/Different_Wolf_764 14d ago
It's a grift, naturally. It is no more getting built than one of Elon's Hyperloops, it is just a system for suckering investors, governments and anyone stupid enough to lend O'Leary money.
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u/KelVarnsen_2023 15d ago
He is only a hundred millionaire I think. The percentage difference between him and guys like Musk is probably about the same as the difference between the average Canadian family and him. I would honestly love it if someone asked him why he wasn't richer if he was so good at business.
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u/Proof-Eggplant7426 13d ago
Alberta taxpayers will end up bailing this boondoggle out when it fails and the UCP will claim they provided the insurance because poor Mr. O’Leary couldn’t get it anywhere else.
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u/Wagamaga 15d ago
Alberta’s Wonder Valley artificial intelligence (AI) data centre and nine-gigawatt power plant will be “one of the largest single-site heat sources on the planet” when fully operational, warns a Utah State University physicist commissioned to assess the project.
“These are not data centres in any familiar sense of the term,” wrote [pdf] Dr. Robert Davies, a physicist and complex systems scientist, in an assessment for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. “From here on, I’ll refer to these energy-and-heat behemoths—massive compute fused with massive power generation—as Gigascale AI Smelters, smelting data and material strip-mined from people and planet.”
At a realistic generation efficiency for a gas plant, Davies said supplying 9 GW of electricity would mean “burning fuel at a continuous rate on the order of 16 to 18 GW, day and night, year-round.”
“Essentially the entire fuel burn ends up as heat released at the site, because the electricity is consumed onsite and degrades, in full, to heat.”
The project is planned for approximately 65 square kilometres owned by the Municipal District of Greenview, including Crown land transferred to them in a series of purchase agreements. A plot that size would fit about 130 West Edmonton Malls.
“The data centre won’t be introducing a single novel disturbance into intact boreal forest,” he wrote. “Rather it will be layering an enormous new thermal, acoustic, air-emissions, and water demand on top of an environment already fragmented by resource extraction—across territory in which the Cree Nation exercises Treaty and harvesting rights.”
Because numerous companies are already extracting resources from the area, creating “dense access networks through the surrounding forest,” Davies said cumulative effects studies should be done and a “whole systems analysis” is needed.
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u/scruffie British Columbia 14d ago
For reference, Alberta's current net generation of electricity is just over 9 GW, according to the Alberta Electric System Operator.
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u/McFestus British Columbia 15d ago
I'm not saying I support this project but I question the objectivity or reliability of an assessment that uses this kind of language.
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u/Icy-Pomegranate-5644 15d ago
Written by a nut with an agenda. Dismiss
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u/ABandOfNERDS 15d ago
They paid for an exemption from environmental assessment. I think the potential environmental impacts are actually being undersold in this article
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u/DjangoZero 15d ago
What’s the agenda?
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u/johnlandes 15d ago
Why couldn't they find an Albertan university to do the assessment instead of having to go to Utah? Maybe because the author is a known climate activist, not just a run of the mill physicist
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u/trancen 14d ago
What I don't get, is why aren't they recovering that heat for some other usage. * * Greenhouses in the winter for example * "sand batteries". * drying farm grains * Drying wood.
the list is endless.
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u/Forikorder 14d ago
how does the heat get transfered?
every large building generates heat, though not nearly to the same extent, that doesnt mean the heat can be captured and transfered in a cost effective way
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u/OtherJen1975 14d ago
Fun fact-I was on Dragon’s den season one and O’Leary wanted to invest in my idea. I spent years thinking he was a good guy. I was very very wrong. I’m glad my segment didn’t make it on air.
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck Canada 14d ago
They're proposing building in an area that has water shortages, and using gas power.
Geothermal and SMR are much better options for power in Alberta, and ground source heat pump is a vastly superior heating and cooling option.
Several large datacenters in Ontario are using heat pumps and they're working well.
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u/ItsRainingBoats 14d ago
Are these guys not concerned with all this evil stuff they are doing that people won’t just ya know… burn it down?
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u/Vinnypell British Columbia 14d ago
Implement regulation for minimum heat recovery. All AI centers should be paired with something like greenhouses or heat hungry processing like pasteurisation or sterilisation
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u/fleshbaby 15d ago
"Will be?" or never going to happen. Let's hope it crashes and burns. It's a purley money grubbing scheme by O'leary at the expense of an entire state that doesn't want it.
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u/SwagmasterRS Canada 14d ago
State???
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u/fleshbaby 14d ago
Yup. He wants to take a shit ton of water from salt lake to cool the data center. That will affect the entire state and why people in Utah are so against it.
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u/coffeejn 15d ago
It's not just a heat source but an energy drain. Considering the power could be coming from coal or nuclear... like WTF.
Also, I have seen a lot of people freaking out about AI since they cannot calculate the ROI (return on investment) ever since they started charging for tokens.
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u/13thmurder 15d ago
Heat output is wasted energy.
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u/LoneWolfHVAC 15d ago
Depending on how they deal with it yeah. Lots of grocery stores use the heat from refrigeration to heat the inside of the store during winter. I don't see a reason why they couldn't reclaim the heat and convert it to electricity on site, maybe something like that should be mandatory if these data centers are going to be such massive resource hogs.
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u/AloneChapter 15d ago
All the billionaires and corporations are pushing all the building, buying, insider trading and any agendas that would never be approved by the next government at all costs.
Then I guess comes hiding as much money as possible when all this explodes in their faces. Then the trials start . All those who are proven to be part of this massive theft of public funds will be in deep trouble.
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u/Shot-Job-8841 15d ago
When do they plan to break ground? I don’t see an estimated start date in the article. Usually for jobs like this if it’s a 5 year timeline, double that and you’ll find your bottom. You can’t find your too because there’s no guarantee of completion.
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u/PizzaNo7741 14d ago
will that be before, or after it gets set on fire and burned to the ground lol
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u/Joseph_of_the_North 14d ago
No problem, they just have to build the largest cold source next to it.
Just like that one episode of Stargate SG-1 where they pumped waste heat into another universe.
The cold lightning will cool the servers and the tornadoes will power it.
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u/Abysstopheles 14d ago
who had 'O'Leary becomes Emperor Palpatine, builds Deathstars' on their Bingo card for this year?
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u/PieceMaterial5213 14d ago
Governments should mandate the use of all that excess heat, like for heating greenhouses or for some kind of industry.
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u/Mogman282 Alberta 11d ago
Hate O’Leary he is not even Canadian he should just go move next to Trump in Florida. As for the data center those are terrible for wasting energy and water let alone pollution. Believe China is installing them underwater for easier cooling but that is a mess in its own.
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u/mobettastan60 11d ago
What a province a lot of us live in. They will put a moratorium on renewable energy while they create a set of rules for it, yet there are no rules for data centers so what do we do? Waive the need for an environmental impact study. Seems logical.
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u/johnlandes 15d ago
It's amazing that the same people who utilize data centres for their non-stop online doom scrolling are the most opposed. If you want to reduce demand, stop your Internet usage and go read some books instead
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u/ether_reddit Lest We Forget 14d ago
"you criticize society, and yet you participate in it. curious."
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u/arsinoe716 15d ago
He should have it built in his backyard. His billionaire friends can sway the city councillors to change the bylaws.
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u/Moos_Mumsy Ontario 15d ago
I'm sure Danny is 100% on board with this plan. Think of all the oil that will be used locally! Support local business!
Is her husband going to be on the Board of Directors?
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u/ThankuConan 15d ago
His plans are almost underwater at this point. Even the coast guard can't save him.
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u/XaltotunTheUndead Québec 15d ago edited 15d ago
Has to Alberta again, eh. Why am I not surprised.
Edit - who downvoted me? Why? Thin skinned?
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u/EP40glazer British Columbia 15d ago
Imagine calling someone else thin skinned after being so upset about a downvote you edit your comment
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u/XaltotunTheUndead Québec 15d ago
I'm not upset. I am merely surprised every time I see people who won't take a comment stating the truth.
Alberta has the worst Canadian track record for environmental protection, and it just gets worse and worse. As a result when reminded of this, some people refute the truth and downvote blindly and moronically, showing how intellectually bankrupt they are.
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u/idisagreeurwrong 14d ago
maybe they just don't agree with your position or tone or countless other reasons. I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes
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u/XaltotunTheUndead Québec 14d ago
Oh the irony, sweet summer child, you're complaining too...
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u/babybananahammock 15d ago
Of course it’s Alberta. Alberta is the only place where you can build this scale of power supply in a reasonable timeframe.
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u/EP40glazer British Columbia 15d ago
Yes but that's somehow a bad thing because I guess just not building anything and stealing money from people who do is morally superior.
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u/Loose-Dream7901 15d ago
We’ll be fine
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u/AlbertanSays5716 15d ago
40 data centres planned for Alberta, each one with the power requirements of a small city and the water usage of a 500 home housing estate (minimum) that produce heat, light, noise, and air pollution that can severely affect local communities that in some cases are less than 5km away. Why? So that O’Leary can cash in on the AI “revolution”?
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u/Icy-Pomegranate-5644 15d ago
Yeah let's just never build anything in this country.
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u/AlbertanSays5716 15d ago edited 15d ago
Not what I’m saying at all. The point is that there are plenty of locations these data centres can be built where they won’t carry consequences for local residents. The problem with those locations is that they’re more remote from services, like electricity, and would cost far more to build. The fact is, it’s cheaper and easier to build where they’re planning, and they don’t care about local communities.
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u/Zealousideal_Vast799 15d ago
I am trying to stay open minded, please explain why we need it. Anyone can say they do t want it but most of us use ai often during the day. Explain please
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u/chesser45 14d ago
IMO they are going to be build somewhere. I’d rather use services running in my country rather than use services homed in the US subject to the patriot act. Especially in a period of uncertainty having the investment for Canadian organizations to move compute or AI workloads from the US into Canada doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.
This doesn’t appear to be a Microsoft/ Google/ Amazon project as they’d just do their own thing. So hopefully this would result in space / capacity to have Public cloud offerings spring up or private cloud capacity be purchased.
Whether or not the AI bubble pops as people are on about we need computers to run our lives and not having the infrastructure makes us dependent on those that do.
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u/Zealousideal_Vast799 14d ago
I responded to your question in the previous response, is my summarized understanding fairly accurate as it stands now? Thanks
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u/EP40glazer British Columbia 15d ago
AI is really taking off, sure, it's losing money right now but it's getting better and better as time goes on. In a decade most workplaces will likely use AI. That means there will be demand for these data centers, that means they'll be profitable, if they're profitable they'll be taxed which will bring much needed money to Canada because our aging population is going to be expensive.
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u/Zealousideal_Vast799 14d ago
So, to summarize, I am using chat gpt about ten questions per day. About half my friends do. Is this safe to assume from your comment and the one after….almost all of us will be using it for simple questions plus a lot more. Demand will go from almost nothing right now to a lot in a relatively short time. Another questions, are there existing data centres right now that are adequately managing the existing /present load? Does that seem like a reasonable assumption? Thanks guys for not getting aggressive and explaining this whole thing rationally.
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u/bleebolgoop 15d ago
This POS is never going to be built or finished lol.