A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle:
Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities.
This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
Look, the point about data centers that everyone misses or ignores is that they're merely a consolidation.
All these machines used to be in Machine Rooms of universities, corporations, government and contractors. The only dedicated "data centers" when I was growing up were Supercomputer Centers and the like.
But all this computing capacity and the network equipment was still installed and running, but it was "hidden" in ordinary office parks, in ordinary office buildings, and it was totally scattered and decentralized. Every corporation and business was running its own machine room and network closet, and they were supplying the power and cooling and all the overhead belonged to them.
So with migration to the cloud, we get consolidation, and all those individual and decentralized "machine rooms" and network closets are being hollowed out, and vacated, and all that equipment is being moved and offloaded to dedicated cloud services, where they can all be concentrated and centalized in... data centers.
And that is the simple reason why data centers are popping up like mushrooms everywhere, and simultaneously all this office space is sitting vacant (it's not merely WFH and remote workers, guys: it's both of these effects simultaneously!)
Of course, we can stipulate that computing power and resource consumption is still growing so the datacenters are gonna be larger and hungrier than their decentralized predecessors, but still, this is evolutionary and not revolutionary, and no NIMBY movement or Luddites or Butlerian Jihad will stop the growth of these juggernauts, because basically now they are necessary for a functioning society, and ordinary people don't even realize how much so they are necessary and indispensable to their ways of living.
it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it.
Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
According to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.
A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)
Look, the point about data centers that everyone misses or ignores is that they're merely a consolidation.
All these machines used to be in Machine Rooms of universities, corporations, government and contractors. The only dedicated "data centers" when I was growing up were Supercomputer Centers and the like.
But all this computing capacity and the network equipment was still installed and running, but it was "hidden" in ordinary office parks, in ordinary office buildings, and it was totally scattered and decentralized. Every corporation and business was running its own machine room and network closet, and they were supplying the power and cooling and all the overhead belonged to them.
So with migration to the cloud, we get consolidation, and all those individual and decentralized "machine rooms" and network closets are being hollowed out, and vacated, and all that equipment is being moved and offloaded to dedicated cloud services, where they can all be concentrated and centalized in... data centers.
And that is the simple reason why data centers are popping up like mushrooms everywhere, and simultaneously all this office space is sitting vacant (it's not merely WFH and remote workers, guys: it's both of these effects simultaneously!)
Of course, we can stipulate that computing power and resource consumption is still growing so the datacenters are gonna be larger and hungrier than their decentralized predecessors, but still, this is evolutionary and not revolutionary, and no NIMBY movement or Luddites or Butlerian Jihad will stop the growth of these juggernauts, because basically now they are necessary for a functioning society, and ordinary people don't even realize how much so they are necessary and indispensable to their ways of living.
it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.
You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
¹https://solidproject.org/
People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it.
'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc.
Even you use HN.
Not everything can be local.
My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
> after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus
Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?
Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.
Data center water use is a fairly separate topic from what this article covers. Related of course but the conversation on USE centers around actual volume use, not contaminants.
Discharge, is part of "water usage". Arguing otherwise is embarrassing.
According to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.