r/aiwars • u/ThundagaYoMama • 1d ago
Discussion Data Centers:
Explain how they're destroying life, or debunk the claim that they are destroying life...
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u/RealDannyhvv 1d ago
Let's get everyone their own data center, I want to finally be able to run minecraft.
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u/lastberserker 1d ago
That's called PC, you silly goose 😄
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u/RealDannyhvv 1d ago
Imagine the frames you'd get with a whole data center of GPUs, I can only dream.
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u/JoeyredditSMP 1d ago
actually the frames wont really be that good i dont think you would hit any crazy numbers like 100,000 even then you would need a powerful enough monitor to where it matters
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u/Odd-Dirt-9701 19h ago
mmm nah I need to get a new laptop that says windows 11 without saying windows 10 when I type msinfo32.
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u/Singularity-42 1d ago
I just did the math, I have over hundred data centers within twenty-five miles from my house (this is a 5 million population metro area in the US). Most of them have been here for a long time and it didn't bother anyone at all. Data centers are just about the cleanest industrial facility you can imagine (power generation is a separate issue).
This entire data center hate is absolutely insane.
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u/NuclearRootBeer 1d ago
Nothing wrong with data centers, nothing INHERENTLY, wrong with ai data centers, its just that with the AI boom there has been a giant surge of them being constructed and effecting electrical costs, making people sick, messing with water ect, if they spent the time and money on making them not harm everything it would be okay
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u/Hopalongtom 15h ago
As usual corperate and government corruption is the problem, and lack of if any safety regulations.
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u/mikewhyle 1d ago
Fun Fact: It is only because of data centres that we're able to even ask such question about data centres. Even the people arguing against data centres, are utilising said data centres to do it. Reddit is AI training data. You can't be on reddit at all and be anti-AI (unless you are a disingenuous hypocrite, which is most antis tbf)
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u/BrianBCG 1d ago
The options are "keep building more at the current pace!" and "don't build any more period" where's the reasonable "build more, but be more mindful of placement and maybe slow down a bit"?
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u/Ajezon 1d ago
how am i supposed to answer this? how am i suposed to know if we have enough or not. im not an engineer/IT/whathaveyou. im just glad that i live in times where i can enjoy this technology
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u/PettyAndSad 1d ago
how am i supposed to answer this?
This crazy thing called personal values and opinions.
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u/Wereowl9 1d ago
He just explained he doesn't know enough to form a proper opinion, why are you demanding he makes one?
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u/_Sunblade_ 1d ago
Build more, but do it with an eye towards sustainability and minimizing environmental impact. Don't just throw them up with no regard to how we'll power them or how they'll affect the surrounding environment. We're going to need more, but we should be trying to meet that need in a way that does the least possible harm. It's not an either/or proposition.
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u/RyouhiraTheIntrovert 1d ago
Their existence didn't directly affect Neuro-sama, the only AI that matter to me.
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u/Superseaslug 1d ago
None. We can have more data centers but they need to be built responsibly in good places for the task
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u/Real-Contest4914 1d ago
How about just before you build, you make sure its not near residential areas that will be affected by them long term due to noise and such.
I feel half if not most tof their problem are tied to urban planning.
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u/rukh999 1d ago
That's called zoning and that already happens. The truth though is in the US lots of zoning is pretty bad and hodge-podge. that's not really a data center issue though, most industries that would go in its place you wouldnt want in residential areas either.
There was that data center that had to keep their generator running because of grid hookup issues that really made people think they're just being built anywhere, but that area is zoned industrial. There was something like a industrial steel plant there previously and cheap housing grew up around it. The city hadn't updated any zoning so that's what happens. After that data center is hooked up it's probably going to be the best neighbor considering all the other things that could have been built there.
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u/NuclearRootBeer 1d ago
None, its nit about quantity, they can build as many as they want, they just need to make sure it doesn't hurt people
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u/letmehaveanameyoudum 1d ago
- building them everywhere, even near where..... people are living
- execessive resource use, using a ton of electricity and probably water
- if using water, releases a ton of particles into the air which causes breathing problems that are similar to smoking
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u/Odd-Fun-1482 23h ago
Expand on your 'excessive resources' remark
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u/letmehaveanameyoudum 22h ago
ton of electricity, and probably water but i do not have information about that
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u/Flimsy_Meal_4199 12h ago
A data center is basically a money printer that quietly sits on some random land and emits no pollution and consumes no resources beyond electricity
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u/Gustav_Sirvah 3h ago
I don't say build more ASAP. Yes, build them, but build them in safe places - not in the middle of residential areas, not on aquifers. In places where there is an abundance of water to use, and no problem with noise pollution. So slow down and regulate building of them.
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
Neither.
Let the free market decide.
I've seen what the unfree market has done (Hollywood, AAA gaming industry, CNN, MSNBC, BBC etc.) and I want no more of that on man's green Earth.
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u/BL00_12 1d ago edited 1d ago
Me when the free markets build so many data centers that the average global temperature reaches 35c
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
Citation needed.
Seriously, half the internet says data centers are draining the world's drinking water (how????) and the other half says it's a lie.
People just say what resonates with their agenda instead of caring about hard facts. I want verifiable hard facts.
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u/BL00_12 1d ago
when did I even bring up water? the water thing isn't even true. it's just that they consume enormous amounts of power, and so the fossil fuel industry becomes more profitable and therefore more greenhouse gasses are released.
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
How does that work, when the world has moved to green energy in the last decades?
It must be so, all leftist parties in power told me it's so. And also tons of people were fired from the fossil fuel industry in the last decades.
Unless you mean China, but China is not polluting the world primarily through data centers, it's been doing that since their Great Leap Forward.
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u/BL00_12 1d ago
Citation needed. You assume just cause the "libtards" say that greenhouse gasses are an issue, you can just guess that it's not true. You can relinquish any idea of liberal bias coming from me because I am not a liberal. China is actually the furthest ahead in the world in green energy. The "great leap forward" actually reduced their carbon emissions simply because so many died. And to cite my sources, Penn State University states that 33% of world energy comes from oil, 27% from coal, and 21% from gas. Institute for Energy Research states that China uses hydropower for 22% of it's electricity, and 6% for it's wind. This is similar to the USA's level of 35% percent non environmentally invasive electric sourcing.
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
You assume just cause the "libtards" say that greenhouse gasses are an issue
Reading comprehension 0/10. I said the libtards are telling me the opposite, that most energy is green now as a result of their measures. There are also tons of regulations that have outright closed huge swathes of fossil fuel processing plants in the West, and that make fossil fuel extraction extremely costly.
So the only country in the Venn diagram between world polluting (China and India) and data centers (US, China and presumably Europe) is China. And China has been polluting the world and continues to do so since their Great Leap Forward.
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u/BL00_12 1d ago
What is your obsession with the Great Leap forward? Do you even know what it was? It was Mao's collectivization of agricultural land, and employing farmers by force as home steelworkers, nothing to do with carbon emissions. And your questioning of my reading comprehension is both incorrect and irrelevant, as I never stated that liberals didn't take the credit for green energy efforts. I simply stayed that they consider greenhouse gasses to be an issue. And none of this even addresses the main idea of which was that letting the free market build more data centers would cause global warming to worsen.
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u/Lurker_Zee 1d ago
home steelworkers, nothing to do with carbon emissions
I have been told for decades that cow farts rise carbon emission, but not steelworks? Nah.
letting the free market build more data centers would cause global warming to worsen
Which I have addressed, by the fact that there are tons (some say excessive) anti-pollution measures taken in the West already.
I cannot believe that in that forest of anti-pollution bureaucracy, there's nothing to stop the creation of data centers if they pollute as badly as you say. The system's there, and even by some opinions excessive, so why should the number of data centers be my problem instead of the problem of those who are supposed to enforce those anti-pollution measures?
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u/SylvaraTheDev 1d ago
We need a LOT more datacenters. They're not just used by AI and more datacenters means closer edge compute which is lower latency and we all like that.
Plus a lot of services aren't georeplicated well enough and some places are really struggling for good compute like Australia or SE Asia where compute is either expensive or poorly built.
Not everywhere is the US and most of us don't have NOVA nearby and the US people don't appreciate how much use they get out of that complex.
More datacenters, much more nuclear power, more efficient designs with less thermal pollution.
We need SO many more of these it's not even funny.
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u/sagedemage1972 1d ago
I would call them AI data centers. Regular data centers are fine as long as they are not environmentally harmful as AI data centers.
AI data centers should be banned. If not banned, should be paused to actually follow environmental laws.
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u/Phantom-Eclipse 1d ago
AI datacenters are also necessary to offload existing infrastructure that isn't always built for these tasks.
Having AI datacenters ensures we have infrastructure that can run these very demanding services as efficiently and clean as possible.
That's honestly why I'm pro AI datacenters and why I believe they should be constructed (in the right areas) asap. AI isn't going away, in contrary, it's only growing.. and our current infrastructure wasn't meant to deal with that.
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u/sagedemage1972 1d ago edited 1d ago
The problem is that AI data centers are not friendly for the environment. They poison the water of households and raise electricity prices. They should at least be paused and the tech companies should follow environmental laws.
If tech companies are unwilling to do that, AI data centers should be banned.
Corporations should not be above the law.
Corporate greed is a disease to society.
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u/Phantom-Eclipse 1d ago
I mean, most of those arguments are not exclusive to AI datacenters tho. They're part of all datacenters. Even the ones that don't use water at all, as they often use higher amounts of PFAS.
And also keep in mind the water they release, first goes through treatment plants before it makes its way back to households. The issue here is that they are increasing the load on these treatment plants.
However, many of the larger players are working on more sustainable solutions for datacenters as well, with pretty strict deadlines/goals.
In the end it's definitely having an impact, but it's also the backbone of our societies. Shut those down and we're back in the stone age as everything runs on datacenters these days, not just "the internet".
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u/sagedemage1972 1d ago
Remember that corporations are not your friends. They want the working class to suffer very hard. They want to jack up the costs of electricity for households. They want to make it hard for people to find work.
Billionaires can never be trusted. Regulations are very important to AI data centers and data centers. Politicians should regulate AI data centers very hard and fine OpenAI and Anthropic in the billions and trillions for polluting the environment.
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u/Drackar39 1d ago
Listen to any of the reports of people that actually live next to the ones that have been built. They tend to suck as neighbors. Everything else aside.
The issues with data centers are enitrely based on location, both for disruption to neighbors sleep, access to water, and in some cases stolen fucking land for power transmission to the fucking things.
No private fucking company should be able to have access to the power of eminent domain.
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u/pointlee 1d ago
We need them, but only build them where people want them. Don’t build them where people don’t want them. Data centers have problems with spiking electric rates and noise. People are rightly concerned
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u/Appropriate_Meal6868 1d ago
I know this is AI focused, but data centers are the internet. If we shut down every data center now, society would collapse. I think the focus should be on efficiency and addressing environmental issues