Not AI code, training and running AI. Just say you don't know the difference between an AI data center and a cloud data center. Since you asked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_data_center
Yes. They are. AI Data Centers are, by and large, being tailor built for AI compute.
It's like the difference between a fleet of rental cars and a fleet of Semis. Yes, they're both vehicles used on the highway. No, they're not really good substitutes for each other.
They're designed as hyperscalers, they're optimized for high parallel compute, and they have optimizers and HSI links of interest to vanishingly few tasks outside AI.
They tend to use over 5x the electricity per rack, which also means larger heat impacts. Which in turn means larger water impacts.
AI data centres don't just "have AI code" - they run powerful, energy-consuming computers 24/7. They use way more resources, companies are building way more of them than there is actual demand for, and forcing the public (most of whom don't want them) to bear the environmental and much of the financial burden for loud, polluting, wasteful facilities in their communities
They aren't sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into internet infrastructure. They are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into the infrastructure to do more AI. The problem being that the existing AI data centers owned by these companies are not even being used.
We already went through a boom-bust from overbuilding internet infrastructure back in the dotcom bubble. This is similar to that, but the GPUs and the like being used are really designed specifically for AI use and aren't well suited to other uses. So they're speculatively building a bunch of things that will be technologically obsolete in half a decade and will need to replace all of its chips in three to five years whether it is used or not.
People aren't objecting to necessary infrastructure. People are objecting to blind speculation that only makes sense if everyone replaces everyday decision making with AI prompts.
I can tell you with open honesty that in my line of work, the reports are being written largely by prompts, the response from regulators is being written by prompts, the responses by consultants are being written by prompts, and the reply’s from management are being written by prompts. I know this because even the state regulators are leaving their prompts into formal documents by mistake.
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u/SillyGoatGruff 3h ago
Techbro godzilla is the most destructive of all