AI Datacentres use about as much electricity as the NHS - go figure.

They should be built in remote places and made to generate their own electricity by renewables they build for their own use. They shouldn't be taking up a nation's limited supply of energy.

Better still they shouldn't exist at all for general use LLM's, just for scientific, technological and medical specialisms intended to advance quality of life and care of the planet.

I guess I'm an old fuddy duddy.
 
The power density of these AI machine has really shot up compared to data centres of old. It used to be we talked about maybe 240Vx 32Amps for a rack, so about 7.5Kw but now they are many GPUs stacked together they are now talking about 1000KW per rack. This is why they have moved to exotic cooling with water as the transfer and all the extra noise. These GPU based data centres are nothing like the data centres that are all over the country already they are completely different level of consumption. I wish it was for something that had more value.
 
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Trish said:
They should be built in remote places and made to generate their own electricity by renewables they build for their own use. They shouldn't be taking up a nation's limited supply of energy.
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exactly.

It’s the same thing for water use. Like they don’t need clean water. They could be integrated into greywater/industrial water systems and not “waste” any water. But no apparently profit and building them as fast as possible is all that matters so they’re plugging into the clean water grid and taking it away from communities who need it. The fact this is happening in the desert in the US is so ridiculous.
 
I just don't see all the data centers being built. Selling matrix multiplication as something that will take everyone's job was a massive mistake by the tech oligarchs. People will be protesting these centers everywhere within a year, in fact it is already happening and this was before increasing energy prices.
 
Utsikt said:
The strategy in Norway has always been to build any power hungry facility in small villages where the tens or hundreds of jobs would make up a large enough proportion of the job market to get the politicians to agree to basically anything.
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I wonder if a strategy in the future will be not to build anything in such countries and out-source it to countries where electricity is virtually free (or at least is pretended to be so). Maybe they are waiting for more stable governments, but I'm sure they can arrange that. Doesn't Palantir have a contract with the DOD?
 
Rick Sanchez said:
Selling matrix multiplication as something that will take everyone's job was a massive mistake by the tech oligarchs.
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I think the impact on peoples lifes and their jobs is being underappreciated, I think the livelihood of tremendously many people will vanish in a very short timeframe.
 
Beyond the noise and environmental impact one of the big problems with such an enormous energy consuming centre is that it will result in yet more gas usage because we don't have enough wind/solar yet. This will push energy prices higher for everyone just based on how our energy market works. The same thing has been happening in the USA where more expensive and easy to access fossil fuels have been used to power them. The UK is already struggling with some of the highest electricity energy prices in the world and they have only recently started to come down due to a higher percentage of solar and wind, this would set that back quite a bit.

I don't want to be paying higher electricity costs just because a new data centre has been built, its not going to bring much in the way of jobs since its mostly just computers after its built.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I can't help thinking that all this must be financed by wishful thinking about the infinite opportunities of marketing income and a huge Ponzi scheme.
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There's a tech journalist/blogger called Ed Zitron who is pretty convinced (and pretty convincing imo) that this is essentially the case.
 
It just speaks to the total insanity of Silicon Valley that they started pushing this as the climate crisis became an imminent threat.

LLMs are not worth any of the impact these data centres will have. Before they enshittified it Google search worked just fine, and didn't require mass plagerism...
 
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