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Perfect! While we're clearing all those dumbass trees in the national parks we can feed them through a wood chipper and make a bonus one-time profit of pennies on the dollar! Let's GO!!My opinion, you need to build data centers, that's what Deserts and National Parks are for. Who's with me?Seriously: China, thanks for the Assist on this one. Who's ready for brownouts........
Wait till they read the report that shows Whale Oil is really the ideal cooling medium for these server farms.......they can market it as Environmentally Friendly and Organically sourced...someone ring Japan, they know a bit about this.....Perfect! While we're clearing all those dumbass trees in the national parks we can feed them through a wood chipper and make a bonus one-time profit of pennies on the dollar! Let's GO!!
(I'd add an "/s", but there's probably some rich bastards in DC working on this idea right now)
And Chairman (for Life) Xi Shin Ping wants harmony with us. /s /sThey don't care if the data farms are built or not.
They just want make people agitated and angry
The water is mostly to increase efficiency. They spray it on the condenser coils of their air conditioners. A lot of data centers are actually wet/dry - they switch from spraying water in summer to dry mode in winter. The bigger problem is power grids and how the cost of increasing capacity is often handled. It's often spread across everyone on a chunk of the grid. That's what's getting people mad. Some datacenter plugs in, sucks a ton of power, now the local utility has to buy more power, and the system is getting squeezed so rates are going up.I've always been in a weird place politically. I'm liberal, but I love engineering, technology, industry, and infrastructure. It's no different this time. I think data centers are cool (pun!), but I'm not allowed to tell my friends that.
It would be nice if they'd invest in proper closed-loop refrigeration systems instead of simply dumping water on their stuff and letting it evaporate. That's really my only complaint. Oh, and our power grid sucks. Let's upgrade that instead of complaining that we have to! Fuck all that oil lobbying and let the engineers build amazing new nuclear reactors please!
a lot of datacenters are built cheap and they're stupid loud.
Well I will say that AI datacenters can be noisy:There's also the problem of people conflating actual crypto mining farms/operations (yes those still exist and new ones still get built) with datacenters - the whine from all the GPUs from coin mining operations is specifically what you can hear in a lot of videos blaming 'datacenter noise' from the uninformed - also ones where it's mysteriously just smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood - odds are that's a crypto farm
Well I will say that AI datacenters can be noisy:
If you can hear the actual GPUs, they whine just like crypto mining. Thin servers with small fans run fast. The PSU fans in particular are usually tiny n' whiny. We have a bunch of AI research servers in the DC next to me at work and they whine loudly when loaded (which is basically all the time). Now I would assume that most DCs are built with thick enough walls you don't hear that (I can only hear it because I'm right next to them) but of course there has been a lot of cost cutting going on. Facebook has been literally putting some of theirs in tents. Bet you can hear those.
However the real loud noise, and what I expect people are complaining about, is gas-turbine generators. Any DC worth its salt with have generators, be they massive marine diesel units or natural gas turbines, for emergency power. You rarely hear them except if they are testing, or power happens to go out. However again, lots of BS with the AI datacenters and they want to build before utilities are ready to power them. So they are running on-site power 24/7 using these. THAT you are going to hear, and hear a lot. They are fuck loud and nothing really can be done about it.
While I'm sure some of the shit people are mad about is crypto mining, since that is always built as cheap as possible, there's plenty of new AI DCs that make people mad. Those are also often being built cheap, and the real issue is they are being built fast and having to generate their own power. Like we don't have a big DC in our building but the emergency generator is still pretty fucking loud, and it is only a 250kW diesel, still using a truck-sized engine at that point. So think a large semi rev'd all the way up. The larger DC on campus has a much bigger one, it is a large marine sized diesel and holy shit. It's like 1.5MW I think and has a bigass 16-cylinder engine and it is dangerous to get near to it without hearing protection when running. It would in no way be allowed to run all the time with the noise it makes.
Those are just single generators, and usually the diesel ones aren't as loud as the turbines. The gigafucker DCs for AI have a bunch, some of them like 60+ and have more than half running at any time. That is going to be loud as fuck.
The big noise maker I'm most familiar with is that datacenter I was talking about owned by Meta. Aka Facebook. It's in a Chicago suburb, and it's quite loud. No, not the fans on the GPUs or servers or any other stuff coming out of a server rack. It's the chillers on the outside of the building. They run at high speed and use a relatively small surface area. They're cheap and loud. Meta/Facebook rolled in and zucked the neighbors with their noise.There's also the problem of people conflating actual crypto mining farms/operations (yes those still exist and new ones still get built) with datacenters - the whine from all the GPUs from coin mining operations is specifically what you can hear in a lot of videos blaming 'datacenter noise' from the uninformed - also ones where it's mysteriously just smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood - odds are that's a crypto farm
Data Centers have always existed but to say these new Data Centers are like the old Data Centers is pushing it. It's AI Data Centers that are using gobs of electricity and water and putting that bill onto the locals. Maybe if the Data Centers weren't driving up the cost of electricity and using fresh water like they're golf courses then this wouldn't be a problem?And no one is calling for the end of using websites hosted at data centers.
They had customers? More importantly, enough customers to pay $1.65 Trillion?ChatGPT, Claude, Grok aren't loosing customers.
If AI Data Centers payed for their local impact on utilities then nobody would care, but they don't and it's because even AI companies aren't sure how long they can keep this bubble going. If AI was going to be stupid profitable then spend money so the locals don't ban Data Centers, but they won't because this is a limited time deal. We all know these Data Centers will one day shutdown and become empty buildings that nobody will use because they'll end up structurally unsafe.I'm not against data centers, I just don't like when they don't pay for their impacts on everyone else. So build all you like, just pay for the generating capacity too and don't build water guzzling models in areas that don't have plenty of water. Datacenters don't technically need water at all. Does your home AC use water? No, right? Using a bunch of water just makes them use less electricity. There are some that use liquid to liquid heat exchangers, but those are built next to a river, lake, etc. Lots of power plants do this too.
And no one is calling for the end of using websites hosted at data centers. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok aren't loosing customers. But there is this push to say all the things that make it possible (computer, energy, raw materials) don't do it in the west...just let it magically happen appear out of no where.
You think we gave China our manufacturing? Steve Jobs went to China to make iPhones, not Americans who got lazy and didn't want yucky manufacturing. Detroit didn't collapse because people there got lazy and didn't want to make cars, but car manufacturers got greedy and sent their manufacturing to Mexico. We empowered China in the process.That’s been the Western attitude for a while. We exported all of the yucky manufacturing to countries with lax environmental regulations like China, and then turned around and complained about how much they pollute, unlike the virtuous West, who had none of these issues, of course, because we care about climate change and saving the dolphins while purchasing everything coming out of that Chinese factory. Someone else was doing the polluting, you see.
You're distilling it to blue haired woke people, when it isn't that at all. You even have red necks in Tennessee who don't want them because they drive up their electric bill by 50% and they hear an annoying noise in the distance. It isn't China or blue hair people but normal people with common sense. AI Data Centers don't provide a lot of jobs and increase the cost of living in a time when the cost of living is already too high. For what, AI? What do you think they'll do with AI once they perfect it? They'll take jobs away. You want people to accept these AI Data Centers and pay for it, only to end up losing their jobs to AI?Same deal with datacenters. You’ll see a ton of people with blue hair that are addicted to uploading pictures of their food to Instagram every meal at these protests, presumably because they believe their food pics are stored on literal clouds.