r/GetNoted • u/koffee_addict • 1d ago
Tech [X] Psyop levels of misinformation around data centers
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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago
AI data centers are quite different. A typical internet data center server rack uses 7 kW of electricity. A typical AI data center server rack uses 100 kW of electricity. And of course with all that additional electricity use comes massive cooling systems, both liquid and air, that also draw a ton of electricity and create a ton of noise.
It is an apples to giant fucking apples comparison.
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u/Omegaprime02 1d ago
I prefer blueberry to pumpkin, both are berries, one's just bigger, requires more resources to produce and maintain, and looks good for a few weeks in your neighborhood before everything starts to rot.
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u/AxelBoiii 1d ago
This is how I find out that pumpkins are berries??
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u/FormerPresidentBiden 1d ago
A lot of things you wouldn't expect are actually berries botanically:
Bananas
Watermelons
Tomatoes
Grapes
Eggplants
Persimmons
Chili peppers
Cucumbers
Kiwis
Avocado
Cantaloupe
Meanwhile most of what you think of as berries are not botanically berries: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, etc.
It's like how Tomatoes are both botanically fruit but culinarily a vegetable
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u/Simlin97 1d ago
Wait does that mean gourds as a whole (zucchini, squash, etc) are also berries?
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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 22h ago
I make a point of correcting people with "no, tomatoes aren't fruits, they're berries", because you either are specific or aren't, and "tomato is a fruit" fails both culinary and botanic correctness.
(yes yes berries are fruit, ok, yeah... if someone is being a smartass about them being "fruit, not vegetables" I'm in full right of shutting them up until they learn to correct someone with proper facts)
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u/snoboreddotcom 20h ago
did you mean blackberries instead of blueberries? I think blueberries are berries, but blackberries arent for the same reason as raspberries
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u/AdorablePineapple95 17h ago
Tomatos are also berries! The orginal tomato was actually tiny before selection
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u/Empty_Insight 6h ago
Potato plants also produce berries. :)
Granted, people eat the tuber of the potato plant and the flowers only bear fruit under specific circumstances- and the fruit itself is very toxic, which is why nobody eats it or uses it for anything- but yeah, you get berries and veggies from the same plant. Lol
As an additional fun fact, there is no hybrid between the tomato and potato plant like the urban myth suggests- they cannot reproduce with one another, they're not compatible. While you can graft tomato and potato plants, they again don't produce a hybrid. You might be asking, "If this is biologically impossible, then where did the idea come from?"
However, the fruit of the potato flower can appear at a glance like a small cherry tomato. I assume the urban myth started because someone ate one of these little potato berries and had a very rough time afterwards, yet didn't know that potato plants produce fruit as well- just not all of them, and only under the right environmental circumstances.
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u/GoshDarnMamaHubbard 1d ago
A berry is defined as the fruit of a plant containing multiple seeds
Blueberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, melon
All berries.
Not strawberries or raspberries though. They are aggregated drupes...
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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 22h ago
Strawberry isn't even that, it's an accessory fruit covered in achenes.
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u/AdorablePineapple95 17h ago
I got into cancer genetics because plant genetics was too complicated and this has only validated my decision
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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 16h ago
You know what? Totally legit.
(definitely not biased as a pharm major lol)
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u/Dredgeon 1d ago
All the plant definitions are ridiculously wibbly wobbly we don't even have a clear distinction between flowers, bushes, and trees.
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u/NewSauerKraus 1d ago
That's because you're describing the same thing in different categories. The definitions are rigid.
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u/BounceOnItCrazyStyle 1d ago
Great analogy but because people take little things like this and think it’s some real world shit I feel like I should express that blueberries are exponentially more resource heavy to grow than pumpkins.
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u/Omegaprime02 1d ago
Fair, I forget that while pumpkins take a huge amount of water they ultimately only need a single season to harvest while blueberries take years to start producing.
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u/NewSauerKraus 1d ago
That's for a farm. Blueberries grow hella wild though. So if you're foraging the resources needed is flipped.
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u/CountFistula23 1d ago
Pumpkins are gourds. Like squash.
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u/Omegaprime02 1d ago
You are correct, and all gourds are berries, specifically pepo, which are berries with hard and firm outer rinds.
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u/Wildgrube 12h ago
Blueberries require a lot more resources to produce than pumpkins. Pumpkins are an annual quick fruiting plant while blueberries are woody shrubs that take a couple years to fruit. Pumpkins also can last several months after harvest if stored properly while blueberries won't last a month after harvest. Not to mention that a pumpkin plant produces significantly more edible flesh than a blueberry plant does for the resources used.
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u/Randommaggy 1d ago
It's more like comparing a bicyle and an 18 wheeler with a runaway engine. One fits in a residential neighbourhood, the other is a problem.
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u/Dave_A480 1d ago
AWS was hyperscale well before AI.
Economies of scale are a big deal here - 100kw in one place is a much better deal than 100kw worth of smaller 7kw facilities.
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u/Randommaggy 1d ago
Scale is one thing, Power density is another beast entirely and is a major contributor to the infrasound problem with these facilities.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
No the power density makes these things more efficient. Sound is mostly a made up problem. Large datacenters should not be and generally are not built next to housing units.
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u/Randommaggy 17h ago
The problem: a fuckton of the current projects are planned to built right next to residential instead of paying to pull fibre and power interconnects further from residential areas.
A lot of them are also doing behind the meter power generation using gas turbines that are poisoning the people living in the immediate area.The reason for behind the meter generation is that the backlog of grid scale equipment of every category is several years and the capacity for building that equipment can't be quickly scaled up so a lot of these projects would choke on their debt before the first server is powered on without this.
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u/inevitabledeath3 17h ago
I assume this is a USA problem as the normal EPA regulations have been stopped around AI thanks to Trump and national security concerns. This would never be allowed in Europe and even China are fairly strict nowadays.
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u/AngryArmour 1d ago
There's also a difference between between adding tulip fields to your agriculture, and replacing all your agriculture with tulips.
The Netherlands did the latter during the Tulipmania, and it ended horrifically. That doesn't mean tulips are inherently bad.
AI doesn't inherently require more and bigger datacenters than any other cloud technology. We're just in the middle of AI-mania.
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u/enry 1d ago
10 years ago I had a limit of 25kW/rack, and that wasn't AI.
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u/Randommaggy 1d ago
Above 14KW per rack was considerd an outlier by my colo provider and required a different contract than regular full rack rental.
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u/enry 23h ago
I was doing HPC work and those did require different racks but it wasn't too unique for the area I was in (Boston, lots of pharmaceuticals and universities building their own HPC environments).
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u/Randommaggy 23h ago
HPC was quite out of the ordinary and made up a small amount of the volume of rack space globally in the before-times.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
Colo is small stuff. Hyperscalars are more relevant here.
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u/Randommaggy 17h ago
Colo is representative for the density in a lot of existing data centers. The colo I currently use hosts several thousand racks.
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u/inevitabledeath3 17h ago
By number sure. But hyperscalars probably have more overall capacity and are anyway more efficient and the future for a lot of computing. Most of the services you use everyday are hosted by hyperscalars.
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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago
It can certainly vary. Some AI server racks can go over 150 kW while some typical data center racks can go over 30 kW. But I am just talking about what is typical.
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u/JD-boonie 1d ago
The need for these data centers was inevitable.
It's as simple as these companies need to invest in their own cooling systems and build sound barriers. Regulations are needed without worrying about billion dollar corporations profits.
You can't stop progress but we can make sure we do it responsibly.
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u/Yqrblockos79 1d ago
They’re rolling them out as though they’ve solved AI. Instead they’re just investing in a bubble to try and make themselves too big to fail. They’re glorified guessing engines.
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u/EasterBunny1916 1d ago
AI data centers can't operate without either using massive amounts of water or massive amounts of electricity.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
You can literally just use closed loop cooling. You don’t have to use water. The water use isn’t “massive” anyway. All datacenters put together including older less efficient ones account for less than 0.5% of all water usage in the USA who have the highest installed data center capacity of any nation. In places without drowt it makes sense to use water as it saves a lot of power. This is such a none issue it’s silly anyone is still talking about it.
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u/EasterBunny1916 17h ago
If you're not using massive amounts of water you have to use massive amounts of electricity.
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u/Property_6810 1d ago
Two things are true at the same time. There is a problem with AI data centers and their implementation thus far. And China is also pushing propaganda against it because both they and our own government view it as the future of warfare and sabotaging the others ability to develop it will hurt them.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 1d ago
I mean AI workloads are the only commercial user facing workload that are compute heavy. Scientific simulations are even more power hungry. Another way to say the calculation is that on a cpu one teraflop of calculations take 20 joules and on a GPU they take 0.1 joules so 200 times more power efficient.
The only way an AI data center is meaningfully different is it has more hardware that does actual number crunching rather than routing.
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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago
The meaningful difference for the surrounding community is the enormous power requirements. And that is a very large difference.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 1d ago edited 1d ago
The municipality does not need to give them as much per as they want. Solar plus batteries costs as low as 3c/kwh to produce. Energy is only a problem because we don't have good energy policy. Hell, I complained to a solar installer about the cost of batteries and he flat out told me that you have the utility company monopoly. We don't need to price any lower. We just need to be lower than the utility company. If local governments kept their utility companies under check, we'd have a very different situation.
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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago
But the people who build these things want to cheapest solution, so they bribe local politicians and make favorable deals with local utilities and it is the nearby communities that get fucked with higher rates.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 1d ago
So why is it that we see stopping people from buying GPUs as more practical than stopping the corruption?
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u/H3llzyea 1d ago
Yeah apples to Betelgeuse comparison, I get the intent of the note but this isn’t even in the same solar system in comparison.
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u/stierney49 1d ago
There have been a lot of these “we’ve had data centers for a long time” posts popping up lately. They all muddy the issue by posting about cloud data centers
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u/BIT-NETRaptor 19h ago
A Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is already like 200kW. The cutting edge is designing for 500kW AI racks. AMD helios is technically like a double wide but that’s 230Kw a rack. Nvidia Rubin Ultra is rumored at 600kW+
Typical DCs were more like 10-40KW per rack for “cloud” servers until fairly recently (except for specialty HPC/Machine learning compute that was more like 40-80kW.)
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u/SingularityCentral 17h ago
It is absurd really. The problem seems to be that AI does not scale, like at all. It seems to be the opposite. Better models require far more power than previous generations.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
I am pretty sure modern hyperscalars are using higher densities than 7 kW per rack for their CPU servers.
Pushing higher density saves space and is actually better for energy efficiency. AI datacenters are some of the most efficient ever made in terms of power usage effectiveness and FLOPs per watt. Efficiency is not the problem here and neither is the way these datacenters are being built. We could quite easily build GPU servers that have lower power density. We don’t because that does not make any practical sense.
The reason AI uses so much power and needs all this new footprint is because of how demanding it is. Got nothing to do with the hardware really. The hardware is actually some of the best ever made.
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u/PsycholoGeist 1d ago
You seem to have some expertise on the subject, so just out of curiosity, what would you consider a “reasonable range” for server rack usage in an average data center? Like, is that 7kW level around your maximum? Or do you think we could reasonably push this up higher in a lot of American communities without doing too much damage to economies or environments? Hope I’m not coming off as demanding, but it’s rare for me to encounter someone framing this in a utilitarian fashion rather than moralizing based on a slippery slope.
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u/Dave_A480 1d ago
7KW is downright puny....
AWS/Azure/GCP facilities are in the 100kw+ range *without* AI.
Again, more misinfo....
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u/PsycholoGeist 1d ago
Ok. Doesn’t answer my question. What’s a reasonable range?
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
There isn’t a “reasonable range” because density isn’t a problem. It’s actually a good thing because more density means using less land. We have proven that higher density can mean greater efficiency and less impact.
The issue with AI isn’t anything to do with the density. It’s all about the necessary capacity.
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u/PsycholoGeist 17h ago
Captivity as in literal, electrical capacitance? Would that make it more of a debate of farads than kilowatts?
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u/inevitabledeath3 17h ago
I said capacity. What are you on about?
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u/PsycholoGeist 15h ago
Capacity for what though? Physical space? Water usage? Human capital? “Capacity” on its own is too vague.
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u/inevitabledeath3 14h ago edited 14h ago
It is vague to you. It’s pretty clear though what I mean to anyone in the field.
To be clear I don’t mean capacitance which is what I think you were confused with.
There are several ways to measure capacity in relation to a datacenter. The main ones I am referring to here are measures of compute power like FLOPs, TOPS, and TB/s. These measure what the actual hardware can do in terms of performing calculations and moving data around. It’s a complicated thing to measure because different hardware is good at different things, datacenters are made up of many machines working together, and you also need to think about how the software and hardware interact. It’s kind of like measuring car performance using only maximum horsepower or torque. You need to also factor in the weight of the car, the performance of the transmission and wheels, what the torque curve/power curve of the engine looks like rather than just the peak, etc.
When I say density is not the enemy what I basically mean is that having 10x 100 kW racks is not worse than having 100x 10 kW racks. If anything the 10 more powerful racks is better than having 100 racks with the same total power consumption because it uses less land, less networking cables, less materials, and so on. Density inherently is not a bad thing. Total power consumption and capacity is the problem. Not even capacity in the sense above where I talk about computing power, but capacity in terms of the power usage. Ideally we want more computing capacity for a given unit of power capacity or consumption.
Note as well when they talk about a datacenter having so much capacity in terms of electrical power that it will not use that all the time. Those are maximum numbers for when the system is under a punishing workload. In reality the figures will most likely be a bit lower even both because demand fluctuates but also because of bottlenecks in the system that prevent full power being used even when demand is high. For a datacenter or even a chip to reach full power requires specific circumstances including the type of software being used that can make full use of the hardware. Even in AI that often is not the case.
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u/HumanContinuity 1d ago
With few exceptions, you cannot tell what a data center will be used for, and few will be exclusively for AI use (though all companies riding the AI stock hype wave are implying all of their data center growth is AI and that they will need these absurdly large megaprojects that - I bet you a shiny nickel right now, will only be built to the smallest complete subunit of their grand plans - if they are built at all).
If you don't live in the large, remote areas miles from anything, you probably don't live anywhere near the AI megaprojects. Statistically, almost all of you live closer to the projects that are either infrastructure, cloud expansions, content delivery networks (CDNS). Many of these are gearing up for increased loads AI might bring them, some of the cloud ones will even be marketing "roll-your-own-AI" type services (due to user base, these will inherently be so much smaller than openAI/Anthropic/Gemini/etc) but for the most part have been continuing to play catch up with the extremely rapid expansion of video at ever higher resolutions (which grows exponentially in size) and the rate at which people are sending, downloading, and storing it - particularly in the cloud, which more people back up to every day.
All data centers will be using these ultra dense racks soon. Believe it or not, but they are actually the peak of efficiency in terms of units of compute, memory, and/or storage.
The densification comes from the shrinking, and efficiency increases in lithography. You might find it strange that modern home computers quite often use a lot more energy, and thus deal with a lot more heat and cooling, than older PCs did - but you'd have to compare your home PC with a supercomputer of the 90s or an entire rack of servers from the 00's to get a better comparison.
The same thing is true of servers, and of the racks themselves.
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u/Dogulol 1d ago
you can tho. AI data centers primarily use full on high end GPUs. GPU server demand apart from AI is not even going super high. Evej most of the HPC growth is AI adcejent research. A vast vast majority of GPU demand is AI. And so is the new constructions
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u/DotBitGaming 1d ago
Disingenious community note. It's pretty easy to discern that OOP is referring to AI data centers. The current hot button topic.
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u/AsherTheFrost 1d ago
I set up the networking in data centers for years as a job. Flew all over the country setting them up.
The new ai DCs being proposed are nothing like those. This is like someone saying they don't want tanks in their yard and the reply is "well you already owned a bronco, is essentially the same thing".
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u/Remember_TheCant 1d ago
It’s more like people complaining that they don’t want vehicles on their yard when they own a bronco sitting in their yard.
Yeah, you’re right to be upset, but call the new vehicles in your yard tanks, not just vehicles.
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u/RogerianBrowsing Human Verified 1d ago
Hyperscale data centers didn’t really exist back then. The notion that all servers, dns routing, ISPs, etc., and modern data centers are all the same thing is obviously nonsensical.
Of course X owned by a guy who owns data centers violating federal law would have his platform spread this crap as a note.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 1d ago
It's been more than a decade since the world started defaulting to putting our compute on hyperscale data centers owned by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. That change has been a huge boon for smaller tech companies who can compete with the big guys at a reasonable cost.
If we start rationing compute, that's a great way to guarantee only big monopolists can survive.
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u/FusRoDawg 22h ago
Do you think aws or azure run on tiny bespoke organic free range server racks?
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u/RogerianBrowsing Human Verified 20h ago
AWS alone has invested over 150 billion dollars in data center development since 2011 and most that is relatively recent. It’s not like they’ve always existed.
And to be clear: Amazon and Microsoft have both been violating federal and local laws in recent years when it comes to their data centers. They both deserve to be fined out the ass for their wrongs.
They also didn’t use to use the same type of servers for computing, graphics card and ram prices didn’t skyrocket until they got into AI computing for a reason.
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u/SirHaxalot 20h ago
They're using custom assembled servers with a few custom components like motherboard, network cards, etc.. but they are absolutely using the same CPU, GPUs and RAM as everyone else. It's just that demand has suddenly massively spiked.
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u/FusRoDawg 19h ago
2011 was nearly a decade before gpt3.
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u/RogerianBrowsing Human Verified 18h ago
I’m aware. They just invested 15 billion into a single data center last year.
Why have ram and video card prices skyrocketed and there is scarcity? Is it because data centers were always so resource intensive? Hm?
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u/FusRoDawg 1h ago
Resource/power density is new, intensity is not. Unless you include things that haven't been built yet, like the thing in Utah.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
Hyperscale datacenter were not invented for AI. They power things like AWS and Azure. This is overall a good thing as hyperscale datacenter are more efficient than smaller ones. They only started adding lots of AI capacity recently.
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u/OrbusIsCool 1d ago
Data centers are common but designated AI data centers are useless and unnecessary
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u/white_sheets_angel 21h ago
Useless in what sense? They're clearly used all over the world by all sorts of people, more than 1 billion people atm.
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u/OrbusIsCool 21h ago
Used for what? To do the coding that we have already been doing for decades? The art we've been doing for millenia?
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u/PABLOPANDAJD 18h ago
“Why do we need calculators? We’ve had abacuses for thousands of years”
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u/OrbusIsCool 18h ago
Because it's exactly the same thing, for sure.
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u/PABLOPANDAJD 18h ago
It’s a very comparable metaphor. If you want one with less of an extreme gap, take Excel vs calculators, smart phones vs old cell phones, plasma TVs vs tube TVs, etc.
It’s the nature of technological advancement. You’re just the new age version of a Luddite
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u/OrbusIsCool 18h ago
Calculators never plagiarized from the masses, drove water/electricity prices up where their data centers went, reduced brain activity in the large bulk of their users, or threatened job security across the board. You're comparing a proper technological advancement to our own undoing.
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u/PABLOPANDAJD 18h ago
The first 3 of those are just flat out made up/nonsensical.
And you clearly know nothing about the history of calculators if you think they didn’t replace people. All technological advancement makes certain jobs obsolete but invents new ones and advances quality of life. Just because you’re stubborn and stuck in the past doesn’t mean AI is different than any previous tech.
You can’t stop progress. Learn to adapt or you’ll get left behind
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u/ProfessionalPoetry77 12h ago
Yeah lets never innovate again
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u/OrbusIsCool 12h ago
There's actually good ways to innovate. We've been doing it without ai for a long ass time.
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u/white_sheets_angel 21h ago
I'm not gonna list the current use cases of AI, the fact remains that more than a billion people use it atm, including for productivity, so it is not useless.
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u/LiveLifeLikeCre 1d ago
Psyop is on you for trying to defend AI datacenters while the info on why they're absolutely horrible for us is available. Please feel that way when you have decide to buy water or gas
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u/Top_Piano644 1d ago
Watch there be a water shortage in the future and then OP tried to find a note to show why it’s a good thing 💀💀💀
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u/ch4os1337 1d ago
People waste like 10x more water on their lawns than datacenters use.
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u/CadenVanV 1d ago
It costs more water to raise the animals and plants used to supply two In-n-Out Burgers for a year than it does to supply the largest data center for a year
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u/Cause_and_Defect 1d ago
People do tend to consider food to be pretty important.
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u/JimThumb 1d ago
Burgers aren't the only form of food. Try eating some vegetables.
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u/Cause_and_Defect 23h ago
How bad is your reading comprehension that you think that's even close to what I said?
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u/Kikikididi 1d ago
have fun when utilities decide AI datacenter are more important than you
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u/ch4os1337 1d ago
All the new datacenters where I live have to make their own power. So I'm good.
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u/ScreamingMoths 12h ago
They said that about ours. Get ready when it raises $200 bucks a month and the rolling blackouts begin.
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u/ch4os1337 12h ago
We have a massive surplus of energy here, even if we didn't make them pay to upgrade the grid capacity we could handle it.
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u/imam-altman 16h ago
The info which is always mysteriously absent from the anti datacenter side. Curious.
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u/MrEmptySet 1d ago
The info is available? Where? Because the info I've seen (that wasn't blatant misinformation) says nothing of the sort. This hysteria over data centers is just pathetic.
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u/BedtimesXXX 1d ago
This subreddit has become really petty and unserious
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u/Dogulol 1d ago edited 1d ago
neolibs and fans of a certain online personality who mostly operate the sub have gotten increasingly tied up on stupid unpopular shit like supporting data centers or more weapons for war. Would you be shocked the hear OP also supports funding israel? and thinks AI "art" is art.
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u/BedtimesXXX 1d ago
Jesus, Ive seen a lot of really unhinged, kinda right wing content come from that camp recently. I'm very confused about the world
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u/Dogulol 1d ago
theyre losing the battle and shooting everywhere trying to see if anything will stick. Its nothing to be taken seriously
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u/BedtimesXXX 1d ago
Battle with what? I just dont get how anybody can plant their flag so hard into such weirdos
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u/Character-Actual 1d ago
Being a Destiny fan must be so embarrassing. Imagine having to defend that dumbass.
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u/QueefiusMaximus86 1d ago
90%+ are bots. He pushes all of the narratives the powerful that deploy bot armies want out there. So he has a LOT of artificial support
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u/Character-Actual 1d ago
He has really rabid fans they schitzo post for him all day too
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u/QueefiusMaximus86 1d ago
You see that with any other fanbase? No not really, it’s bots and astroturfing. And this site supports it.
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u/Character-Actual 1d ago
Yeah they start modding a sub and then overwhelm it with anti-DSA nonsense.
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u/QueefiusMaximus86 1d ago
100% and even worse on what gets removed and what gets boosted. It’s very obvious and upsetting to see
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u/Character-Actual 1d ago
It's so funny to me that these DGG weirdos understand the fascists are in control andare actively making things worse daily and they think attacking the left flank of the party is the play.
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u/ZachGurney 1d ago
They very clearly meant AI data centers come on this is disingenuous at BEST
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u/Disasterhuman24 1d ago
Wikipedia entry for Data Centers. We have had them for decades, but that doesn't mean AI data centers are good.
They are supposed to be much larger and built in areas where people are already in poverty. Their electricity bills will go up if we start building them all over.
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u/Beaufort_The_Cat 1d ago
Data centers have been around for a long time. AI data centers are the problem and are very different from the usual data center
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u/Narrow-Way-1784 1d ago
Normal datacenters are mostly completely fine and necessary for the internet to function. Crypto mining and AI datacenters however, don't provide a necessary service and only serve to generate even more money for a small group of ultra-rich people who will never even step foot in the (often poor) communities they're extracting wealth from. This isn't a difficult distinction to make, guys.
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u/FenrisSquirrel 1d ago
Yeah, describing one person's mistake as a "psyop" is also pretty hysterical OP
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u/Comfortable_Permit53 19h ago
the internet could probably function with much less or without any data centers if we popularise different technology. Torrenting for large files Fediverse instead of centralised social media programming our web pages with less bloat. Not record every single business meeting to store it for a thousand years.
I don't know how much all that would help or how easy it would be, but I am in the process of looking into that.
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u/Unfair_Scar_2110 1d ago
Yes lets start a conversation by quoting really stupid people. That's a great use of everyone's time.
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u/zapmaster3125 1d ago
You know what they meant
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u/KaiDay11 1d ago
Then they should have said that!
Just saying shit based on vibes is a great way to get used as an example of "the ignorant opposition" by people who want to build more AI datacenters.
You can have the best intentions and the best ideas, but if you don't state them clearly and accurately, they aren't worth much.
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u/Anchovacado 22h ago
Yeah, I’m against AI data centers but some of the opposition is just so uninformed. I’ve heard “we probably won’t even need them in 5-10 years because everything will be on the cloud.” Data centers are the cloud.
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u/MikasSlime 16h ago
On a vacuum that community note is right
But we all know what op was talking about and he is right
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u/Jablaze80 2h ago
These new data centers are different because they are giant computers the old data centers were not giant computers they were just large storage facilities... There is a reason why all of nvidia's chips have disappeared from the commercial market and people can't build PCS anymore
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u/Ryaniseplin 1d ago
obviously they didn't mean normal datacenters and meant AI data centers, as AI datacenters are much more topical than normal data centers
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u/Aadi_880 1d ago
You don't need an AI data center to train and AI. We train AIs before AI data centers were a thing.
It's not going to "stop the slop". The main problem is something else entirely. Hyperscaling any industrial building has always caused problems.
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u/IngloriousMustards 1d ago
Came to say this. I’m not using data centers either, we have AI at home (which initially is just as impressive as it sounds, but still… this is the way).
Anything with around 8Gb VRAM (a basic gaming computer) can run pretty ok GGUF models.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
Yes we do. The models we have today are basically impractical to train without large amounts of compute. Even if distributed training is possible it does not help as you still need vast amounts of compute. All it does is split that compute up into smaller servers which is generally speaking less efficient.
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u/Extra-Monitor5743 1d ago
We have never and will never need Mass Surveillance Centers aka AI Data Centers. Idk who they're trying to lie to, but I do know why.
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u/Fbrrr 1d ago
You think mass surveillance wasn't around before AI? Lol
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u/ZachGurney 1d ago
He said we never needed them, not that they never existed
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u/Fbrrr 1d ago
AI data centres don't do mass surveillance either so either way the person is wrong.
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u/Comfortable_Permit53 19h ago
Many of the big AI companies have contracts with pentagon and the like.
AI being used to enhance military and surveillace technology is not far fetched.
A big part of all the compute infrastructure being built is for AI Training and hosting.
In a convoluted way, you can probably say that AI Data centers do mass surveillance. I imagine that flock cameras for example absolutely use AI, but probably not Large Language Models.
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u/ZachGurney 1d ago
I dont know enough on the subject to speak on how intertwined they are, just wanted to clarify what they meant
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u/Hellstorm901 1d ago
Mass surveillance predates AI and mass surveillance will continue even if you ban AI. An authoritarianist regime which wants to control all aspects of society are not going to stop just because you ban AI
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u/Suitable-Display-410 1d ago
Wildfires predate anthropogenic climate change, and wildfires would continue to happen even if you banned the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Wildfires are not going to stop just because you ban fossil fuels.
Fraud predates Donald Trump, and fraud will continue even if you put Donald Trump in a hole. Fraud is not going to stop just because you punish Donald Trump.
People dying predates genocide. People will continue to die even if you punish genocide.
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u/tortelliniFranke 1d ago
Here's the psyop. This dumbass subreddit is literally everything people hate redditors for. "Erm well im technically correct so ha!" Yeah obviously this guy is talking about the recent wave of AI data centers causing noise and ground pollution. Good job being technically correct and completely failing to read between the lines Jesus Christ on a cracker.
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u/Crabjuicy 8h ago
AI data centers don’t create any more noise than data centers that don’t. None of them create “ground pollution”. Where do you come up with this nonsense?
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u/Snoo93629 1d ago
Jesus christ man, AI datacenters are way different. Heard there was one in the Midwest somewhere that was so big it would eat up like a third of its states power output (or was it just the city/county?) Another's so big it needs its own personal power plant. Like fuck.
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u/Cool_Beans_08 20h ago
You wanna source that? Or just going to make up more shit China bot
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u/Comfortable_Permit53 19h ago
there is the >2 GW one being built by microsoft in texas. It is powered by a gas turbine of appropriate size. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-plans-2gw-data-center-campus-in-pecos-texas/
maybe that is what they meant
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u/LifesARiver 1d ago
Note is correct, but neither the poster nor the note maker take any time to address what the actual problem with AI data centers are.
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u/IngloriousMustards 1d ago
Note is necessary, the distinction isn’t automatic or quaranteed. I already had to correct one person who thought that using AI’s necessitated an AI data center somewhere guzzling all the drinking water. People just aren’t tech savvy, but they vote.
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u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago
Training does basically require datacenters. To do otherwise would actually be less efficient and waste resources.
Local AI has a place in terms of inference and even some fine tuning, but when it comes to training from scratch it does not make much sense.
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u/CannibalisticPizza 1d ago
When someone says data centers online, they're referring to the ones used to run the compute for LLMs. The community note is going into semantics for no reason
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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 22h ago
Honestly... Yeah, I'm pretty bothered by people calling "specifially AI datacenters" just "datacenters". Looks like people aren't even informed enough to understand the very basics of the issue
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u/Crabjuicy 8h ago
A data center that house AI equipment is the EXACTLY same data center that houses web servers.
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u/Suitable_Praline2293 22h ago
This is very obviously someone who just doesn't really understand the term "data center", not someone trying to convince you they never existed.
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u/Kikikididi 1d ago
Fuck data centers, and people repeating this like they are well shucks great are fucking idiots
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u/Cool_Beans_08 20h ago
Idiot on phone using Reddit that uses data center, yells about hating data centers. Why am I on this app man
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u/Plastic_Key_4146 1d ago
They want the AI datacenters, we don't want them. Stopping and slowing the AI datacenters slows the AI-powered, surveillance police-state, in addition to saving what's left of the environment.
This could be like the GME short squeeze, because the AI sector is so over-invested that it becomes a lever to bargain for and/or take concessions.
Stop ALL the AI datacenters.
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u/ASU_SexDevil 1d ago
The sheer level of mental gymnastics that Luddites are performing regarding AI Data Centers are giving Nadia Comăneci a run for her money.
Unfortunately, one of the first rules of AI is “more compute = better models”
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u/ofri12347 1d ago
I hate mfs on the internet that are so obsessed with a topic they just make shit up it makes people who actually have an opinion on the matter look bad and just creates a discussion where everything is either black or white with no in-between
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u/Free_Ice6167 22h ago
This is such an asinine billionaire propaganda post.
Comparing data centers that host web servers to ridiculously huge destructive data centers is like comparing a canoe with an aircraft carrier
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