Oh, I 'member!
It’s kind of a dumb argument to begin with. Like yeah the grid is weak in a lot of areas, maybe we should strengthen the grid as people electrify their transportation.
It’s like a parent telling a kids “just because”. You’re hoping that they’ll just quit asking so you don’t have to tell the truth or make something else up.
I would still like a solid answer: data centers are essential to WHO exactly? and WHY?
Data centers are actually useful for a lot of things, handling traffic to websites, storing records, academic research, and whatnot. There’s a very good chance your medical records are distributed across various data centers.
AI is absolutely not one of those useful things, and is a big driving factor for the rapid expansion of new data centers which are sucking up so many valuable resources for something so useless. Data centers are not bad, AI data centers are bad
Thank you. And I would like to know what percentage of data centers are exclusively for ai, because that seems to be what’s upsetting everybody lately, that all the farmland being bought up and people’s houses being taken by eminent domain to make these data centers, all for ai? Or for all the other purposes you stated?
A complicated question to answer, I doubt anybody would have a definitively correct answer to it.
The answer is probably both really. It’s not like the internet has just stopped expanding and everything is going into AI now. But AI takes up an unproportional amount of the computational power. A data center can house servers for hundreds of different companies or even individuals, all doing different things with them. An AI data center can be dedicated to one singular company who rents out the entire space for hundreds of servers purely for AI.
Much like it’d be difficult to count every human on earth, there will probably never be a definitive number on how much is dedicated to AI. However, a study by the Electric Power Research Institute in 2024 estimated that between 10-20% of data center power consumption came from AI.
That seems relatively low, until you consider that 10-20% is compared to the 80-90% of power that goes towards literally everything else across the entire internet, and it keeps going up rapidly. For every 8-9 servers used for accounting data, sales records, research, communication networks, streaming services, security systems, medical records, multiplayer game servers, automated factory processes, and everything else in the world that computers handle, there are 1-2 servers dedicated ENTIRELY to JUST AI. And the proportion going to AI just keeps going up.
Imagine if among every single factory in the world, 10-20% of them were dedicated to producing nothing but ping pong paddles, and that percent just keeps going up, the growth of ping pong paddle production outpacing the growth of every single other product in the world that comes from a factory. What the fuck do we need that many ping pong paddles for? Are the ping pong paddles really doing enough to justify this massive resource sink??
The system, to create a worldwide surveilance network.
Taking tax money and giving it to rich people.
The issue is fascism vs helping people. Electric cars help the economy, data centers are being built to monitor and control you.
Electric cars help humanity. But harm oil companies and various related industries that depend on this, and that is all tied into the stock market and other investments.
This one again?
I’m bored of this post
And I’m bored of oligarchs destroying common infrastructure.
No, I don’t remember anyone saying we shouldn’t have EVs because it would require upgrading the grid. I remember people saying it would require infrastructure upgrades which is just objectively true if you want enough fast chargers.
Per MW, a single data center services far more people than e.g. EV charging per MW.
Useless x 1000 is still = useless.
It doesn’t matter how many people it services when its service is something we can easily live without, and only exists to add more billions to the wealth of billionaires. Not so much for EVs.
Ya’ll where do you think these lemmy posts and messages exist?
You’re creating demand yourself by using basically any online platform. Sure we could live without it, but easily?
I know that “Data Center” has become a curse word, but please, not all data centers are AI data centers.
Lol i can host lemmy server on old laptop, you only need data center if very large instance. But lemmy work with tiny instance just as well.
Big LLMs dont add value to anyone but owner class.
The issue was distribution not generation.
Yup, we’ve had this discussion many times.
That said, generation is a bit of an issue (build more renewables) and distribution was always fine as long as you charge overnight, not at peak times.
And that makes this any less fake news how?
Why are you writing like Trump?
To create a juxtaposition and hopefully highlight the shitty low bar. That maybe someone might finally understand their part in trust breaking down.
Do you live in an area with a functional distribution system? I don’t. Anytime a grasshopper sneezes, my area looses power for 4 days.
