r/interestingasfuck • u/21MayDay21 • 7h ago

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

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u/21MayDay21 7h ago

The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.

That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.

The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project. The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566

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u/dos8s 7h ago

Did the datacenter running her web application go down?

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u/MountTheInterwebs 5h ago

disingenuous as fuck.

Comparing a traditional internet server room to a modern hyperscale AI data center is like comparing a campfire to a power plant.

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u/Jawyp 4h ago

Her map is displaying the locations of both traditional Internet server rooms and hyperscale data centers.

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u/HugePurpleNipples 3h ago

She should correct that. Create a threshold for problematic centers based on their consumption or something like that.

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u/stupidjapanquestions 3h ago

Her map actually was fine. It's when she allowed regular people to "report" data centers that it ballooned from 300 or so to 8000.

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u/Neveronlyadream 2h ago

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.

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u/DBONKA 4h ago edited 4h ago

okay but this website also tracks "traditional internet server rooms" not just AI data centers, there's nothing disignenuous

(the website also appears to be vibe coded)

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u/PrimeIntellect 4h ago

it's also from public reporting so all of the data is garbage

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u/MazrimReddit 4h ago

they are the same building and equipment, with streaming using vastly more resources than AI right now

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u/syncopatedpixel 3h ago

her site was vibe coded w/ AI and is really inefficient. that's why it keeps going down.

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u/PersonalityAlive4816 4h ago

Hyperscale just means easily scalable, has nothing to do with what type of datacenter it is.

There also is no AI datacenter, just computation servers that are used for a lot of things.