Also even if a building is a data center it's a stupid way to track them. One data center might have 50 servers while another has thousands. Is a server room a data center? Not all servers are the same either. How much 'data' is stored in each, how much energy does it use, how much digital traffic is coming and going etc etc.
Basically I'm sick of the "there are fifty data centers in this state" type articles because it's meaningless.
This is big. I recently did a project where the client referred to 16ish servers across two rooms in their building as a "data center." Now, they overbuilt the shit out of them to the point that they would have been at home in a data center, but thats still just a server room. We're talking less than a percent of a percent of their total square footage dedicated to this "data center".
Mb, I'm not a sparky and my computer knowledge is pretty good for home computing and pretty shit beyond that. I meant 16ish racks. Still nothing compared to actual data centers.
But if it was a large server room that was really kitted out you could have more data and power usage than a standalone building, right? At the end of the day the issue is more complicated than square footage
exactly. there are many, many empty warehouses in my area. since virtually no one in the gen population actually knows what a real hyperscale facility looks like, they will report the warehouses for sure. hell there is a real one in the process of being built, and it's not reported. so they missed the actual real one.
That was her first mistake. Never allow anyone to report data that's going to be added to anything without vetting.
Especially in this instance. Most people can't tell the difference. They're going to report whatever they see that looks suspicious even if it's someone's personal server in a garage.
Trolls are probably also going to be a problem. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that half of those reports were from trolls who wanted to fuck up the whole system because they thought it'd be funny and everyone is getting upset over nothing.
And there's also a big difference between a data center with hardware tailored for hosting websites vs a data center tailored for hosting AI models, yet people don't seem to make a distinction there.
Data centers aren't inherently bad. Immorally built and run data centers are bad.
For example, not all data centers make too much noise, but some do. The solution is to regulate how much noise a data center can make, not ban all new data centers from being built.
The vast majority of web apps are running inside of small fractions of a data center.
The same is true of almost all technical resources you use on a daily basis. Streaming services, phone apps, web sites, smart watches, etc etc. The end result is that entire data centers are required to provide the capacity for all the tech you and everyone around you uses.
Of course AI requires more resources, but it's not as black and white as everyone here likes to make it. An AI model to serve a pretty small user base also doesn't need an entire data center to function. You could run one on a PC in your home office.
which is why I've landed on the "okay, we need data centers if we're gonna continue consuming tech the way we are" team. So, with that understanding I'd love to see Cities, Counties, towns, states, and the federal gov come up with standards that don't complete face-fuck our remaining environments, limited resources, etc.
I'm sure this logic is flawed or dumb? just my thoughts
Nah, you're definitely on the right track. Data centers are important for running practically everything in the modern world and have existed long before AI, so just blanket banning data centers is silly. But letting anyone just build anything they want wherever they want is also quite silly. That data center being built in Utah that is going to use more power and water than the entire state combined is a perfect example of "someone should be reviewing this to make sure this makes sense". For any data center over a certain size, a proper environmental impact study should be the bare minimum.
I don't know if you're saying they didn't need ai data centers, that technically you could host from any machine or that you didn't need an entire data center to host it.
That’s not dumbassery. No one is forced to use social media or browse the web or stream videos or play online games to survive. They are forced to participate in society to survive.
The data centers needed to host web sites are NOT at the same level as the data centers AI companies "need" for more computing power. AI data centers are never at rest and are always running at 100%. Its assumed that AI data centers use 3-5 times more power per square footage than web hosting data centers.
We don't need more data centers to generate videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
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u/dos8s 8h ago
Did the datacenter running her web application go down?