Jesus christ dude. A few years ago we were marching hopelessly towards extinction, and then a handful of psychopaths decided we should be sprinting. One day a more intelligent lifeform will read our story as a classic tragedy.
This is large, yes, but to put it in perspective:
Currently about ⅔ of datacenter energy is spent on non-AI, like websites, databases, streaming, SAAS, email etc etc etc; ⅓ is AI. So yes, that’s a lot.
But it is also true that global datacenter power generation is currently around an estimated 130 GW worldwide, so the >7.5 GW here is around a 5% increase in just one project. (Well, if the ⅓ estimate is true, 45 GW of the 130 GW is AI, so that will go 45 GW → 52.5 GW or so. So like a… 12%-24% increase, something like that)
And it is also true that it will be primarily/mostly used for AI-related things.
And even worse, seems like this would be prime real estate for solar. Welllllll… you can’t generate 7.5ish GW of constant power, you need extra and battery storage. So unfortunately you need 225,000 acres of solar panels. Larger than Chicago or Austin, covered solid with panels. You’d need upwards of 150 GWh of battery storage. THe US currently has about 30 GWh of battery storage all across the US. So it would drive up the cost from natural gas’s $10B to a project of $120B or so.
So that sucks.
The only mitigating factor I can really find is that every new site increases overhead, so at least if it’s all in one place, it will be a bit more efficient. Also they should not need that full power generation all the time, so while it’s still massive, they are talking the worst case scenario.
I’m not trying to defend this thing. I just hate it when the argument gets reduced beyond reasonable truth, and I looked this stuff up because I was curious. I’m not supportive of this.
Why not just limit ai use to daylight hours?
I’m not sure it’s totally practical to pause large operations… but I mean, it’s a good idea.
It’s a 100% reasonable proposition for sustainability, but since the economics of data centers evolved to assume 24-7 operation, reduction to only daylight hours would lose more than half the use, which easily consumes all expected ROI making even just the hardware investment unjustifiable. It would have to be a regulatory requirement that all companies must observe for the market to accommodate it. But it is 100% possible for every company in the chain to remain profitable without 24-7 operations.
You sound like you acknowledge it’s going to cause huge amounts of environmental damage, but because there’s no other way of powering it… I guess that’s what we’re going to have to do.
Is that a fair take on your position?
Largely a fair take, definitely.
I find myself hating the anti-datacenter thing just because as a geek and web dude since 1994, datacenters are where the internet is, so if you destroy them all, we lose the internet.
But I’m not particularly fond of AI. I’m not nearly as anti as many, but there is absolutely a lot of harm going on. Case in point. This facility is NOT great. And I think they could do it rather better. Maybe solar wouldn’t be an option, but nuclear could be. But because we’re so damn capitalist-centric and environment-be-damned, none of those options would be considered.
It’s a frustrating position to be in because ANYTHING not FIRMLY anti-ai and anti-datacenter is usually heavily downvoted, so I’ve had to learn how to make my case and emphasize that I am not THAT far away from most of the anti folks. lol. I do use some AI for a few things - mostly asking it unimportant questions about trivia online, or to gain basic understanding of things. It does at least as well as googling, and instead of finding videos, which I hate, it gives me the text I want. So it can be handy. But it is also pervasive and capitalists are trying to use it for profit/evil. Soooooo… I’d like it we could find ethical ways of using it, get it to hallucinate less, regulate it so they don’t abuse us with it, and figure out how to use it for all the good that it can legitimately do. Which I know is all unlikely to happen. So I end up being mostly anti-AI… heh
What do you think? I briefly stalked your profile out of curiosity, and scanned some recentish comments. It sounds like we share a lot of beliefs from that brief scan. heh. I support highly regulated capitalism and the DSA, for example.
I think that these days centres should absolutely not be built. They are on a scale we can’t justify economically or ecologically and the technology they support are national security threats.
These are not the AWS-like data centres that “host the internet”. These are compute only. They’re for AI and big-data. Centralisation of the world computation into a few locations under the control of a few billionaires.
So point 1. Destroying these does not harm the internet. It preserves it. The 90s internet was one where anyone could put up a web-server and serve whatever they wanted. Sure, it might get given a hug-of-death when a site became popular, but it was only that one site that was affected. The internet was distributed and not centralised.
Then came the cloud.
Point 2. This is centralising information. I suspect we are already past the point where people are asking chatbots “who should I vote for?”. That alone places millions of votes under the control of whoever trains the LLM model they ask.
The owners become the owners of all information. It’s so handy. Why read a book? In fact let’s destroy books to create the machine. Now you can ask it anything. How do I make a cake? How do I fix my car? Is there a war in
PalestienBa-sing-se?Point 3. The cost is too high. The American stock market is teetering on the price of a huge crash. Bigger than 2008, it threatens to take out several of the world’s most valuable companies. If the damage was limited to them, I wouldn’t worry. Sadly, the banks and investment funds we all use are invested in them. This is Enron x4 plus the banking failure of 2008 in a dot.com bubble wrapper. All whilst the economy in all other sectors is shrinking.
Wall street knows it’s a bubble, but they all want to ride the upside of the bubble, thinking it won’t be them left holding when the crash comes. They could calmly unwind their positions and avoid the crash, but ego and hubris don’t allow that.
All in pursuit of an impossible goal
Then there’s the ecological cost. Lake Mead, on the Colorado river, is at it’s lowest level since it was created by the Hoover Dam being constructed. Drought and water use in the south-western states have steadily drained it for years …and they want to add a water guzzlers on the scale of an additional cities. Now I know this one is in Texas, and not in the Colorado river basin, but this isn’t the only one and I’m sure Texas rivers have their own issues.
Then you have the power supply. Whilst the rest of us are trying to move away from fossil fuels, these guys run towards them. Natural gas turbines (which can’t be built to schedule) belching out CO2 whilst heatwaves, drought, and wild fires are happening across the globe. I guess it gives the fossil fuel companies a reason to keep going though.
So yes, I’m against building these centres. The benefits are low, the societal dangers are huge and…
