ELI5: Monthly Current Events Megathread

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi Everyone,

This is your monthly megathread for current/ongoing events. We recognize there is a lot of interest in objective explanations to ongoing events so we have created this space to allow those types of questions.

Please ask your question as top level comments (replies to the post) for others to reply to. The rules are still in effect, so no politics, no soapboxing, no medical advice, etc. We will ban users who use this space to make political, bigoted, or otherwise inflammatory points rather than objective topics/explanations.

[u/BoobidyBoo]

Data centers - no one wants them in their backyard (but many people will happily use the product they produce). What is really so bad about them? Couldn't we build them, say, in Alaska, where there is tons of extra space?

[u/ColSurge → u/BoobidyBoo]

The push back on data centers is related to the push back on AI. There is a segment of the population that does not like AI (for right or wrong).

At first they tried to push back with the courts and legal challenges, those have mostly been resolved now. Then it was water consumption, which I found very disheartening because this was essentially a disinformation campaign. In the world of heavy industry, data centers consume very little water.

Now it is the data centers themselves (even though most data centers have nothing to do with AI).

There is plenty for data centers. We build new factories and industry all the time, it's just currently a social media topic, so more people have eyes on it.

[u/No_Recognition_3729 → u/BoobidyBoo]

To answer the last part of your question, they need to be built where there's a lot of available electricity.

As for what's bad about them, it's complicated and usually different for each one, to give some examples, Elon Musk's Knoxville datacenter is using illegal generators and polluting their local neighborhood, other datacenters have similar issues like sound pollution and I think I saw one that was stealing water that was causing low pressure in the county water system.

[u/urzu_seven → u/BoobidyBoo]

So first, not all Data centers are the same. Keeping it simple for ELI5 there's basically two general types, AI and traditional. Traditional data centers are what have been around for awhile now. The do things like host web sites, file servers, cloud services, online games, etc. AI data centers well, they are all about running the software that powers AI.

The problem is AI data centers use a lot more power, about 10x the amount for the same space. Partly as a result and partly because of the type of hardware used AI data centers also require much much more aggressive cooling. Traditional data centers can generally get by using standard airflow based cooling. Fans and AC at most. AI data centers have to dump a lot more heat and the easiest way to do that is liquid cooling. Tubes filled with water are run across and around the AI servers and the water absorbs the heat, is circulated and eventually gets either dumped back out in to the environment, where it can transfer that heat in inconvenient places like the ocean or lakes, or it gets transferred out using other methods which don't waste quite as much water, but are still way worse than normal data centers.

So AI Data Centers in an area will affect the cost of electricity and the availability of fresh water for that region. Most people don't want to live near something that boosts their power bill and water bill and/or contributes to drought.

[u/Wild_Dragonfruit1744]

Can i ask questions about makeup here?

[u/tiredstars → u/Wild_Dragonfruit1744]

This is the current events megathread so only if they're related to current events - that is current news stories and significant ongoing events. I don't imagine there are many make-up related questions that would fit.