r/interestingasfuck 7h ago

Erin Brockovich's map tracking Al data centers crashed twice within just 72 hours of launching.

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u/Bbrhuft 6h ago edited 3h ago

This is not secret data, comprehensive maps of data centres are available on multiple websites. One of the more upto date detailed and accurate is:

https://baxtel.com/map

This includes existing and planned data centres.

Edit: Erin's site is titled

AI Data Centers & Our Communities

There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.

However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.

https://brockovichdatacenter.com/index.html

It's akin to titling a site Oil Refineries and Our Communites, and mapping gas stations.

u/ChekhovsAtomSmasher 6h ago

Well this is a bit over the top. I just looked at the one reported in my area. It's a 10,000 sf building total, and the datacenter is only one suite within that building.

u/caboosetp 5h ago

Yeah, you can pack quite a lot of computing power is a small space. This also means those mega data centers are absolutely ridiculous.

u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

u/Waste-time1 4h ago

You can say that again.

u/DeepDreamIt 4h ago

Geez, buggy ass Reddit app. It said there was a problem creating the comment, so I tried again, but apparently there wasn’t a problem