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That is despite huge propaganda campaigns by tech giants and the government in favor of them mind you. Everyone who experienced what it‘s like living near one absolutely hates it for many reasons including health issues from the noise and vibration. Anyone who doesn‘t already got a taste of it when utility bills climbed up.
Not hard to figure out why. There‘s an oil crisis and these AI bro fucks keep constructing giant diesel engines to power the giant data centers. Everyone else loses.
That’s the problem we have locally. No one wants these things, but local government keeps trying to push them through anyway because all they see is tax dollars.
It’s a huge waste of money at this point, and the technology will become rapidly antiquated. The depreciation will be insanely high, while the software that’s requires it becomes much more efficient. At this point we already have enough data centers, we just need more efficient software and smarter usage.
I get the feeling the 3,000+ data centers aren’t being built so everyone can generate slop, but instead are going to end up being the infrastructure for the digital cage. AI won’t replace humans, but it can certainly spy on them quite effectively. Big tech and the U.S. government have been trending towards a fascist merger of state and corporate power for quite some time, and the FBI’s recent partnership with Flock and OpenAI becoming an official member of the military industrial complex are not good news. I fear we are headed towards a historically unprecedented ability for governments to track and control the populace. No matter what, these data centers are not for the benefit of the average citizen.
When was the last time you heard someone mention the NSA? After Snowden’s revelations, one thing that was pointed out was you need massive storage for all of the surveillance data. Interpreting text and visual data being one of the strongest abilities of this AI, it seems obvious that this is what the real push to make it omnipresent is for. All of our data to be fed into the machine to generate lists of dissidents.
They increase the cost of consumer electricity and water; they increase the temperature of the local area; they generate (in some cases) heavy metal pollution and (in most cases) sound pollution.
What’s not to love? ;)
Not to mention some idiot decided to put these water-pollution factories in places that historically have limited access to water and right now are experiencing one of the worst droughts of all time (at least in the top-5). People are a little protective of their precious water at times like these.
China would prefer USA to have less data centers as well. This could help them get and edgeon AI where they are currently like 10 months behind the USA. Dont get me wrong. I don’t want a data center in my backyard. But USA needs better infrastructure planning like china and not leave it up to billionaire, their companies and their short sighted quarterly reports.
A constriction on GPUs is literally the best thing to ever happen to Chinese ML dev.
It made them thrifty, it made them focus, it forced them to go open weights, it made them build proper ASICs, research new techniques, pay engineers to implement them, and now their models are supremely efficient, dirt cheap, running Nvidia free on Huawei NPUs, and close to better tools than the US models.
Meanwhile, US models are all (except maybe Google) enshittifying and getting benchmaxxed. Engineers are wasting man hours hopelessly trying to scale training, which does not scale like people think, and are literally giving GPUs busywork to meet utilization quotas. They’re trying to scale data and parameter count, without improving architecture or data quality or even basic problems like random token sampling, and it’s not working anymore.
At the same time, the big US AI houses have squashed nearly every bit of “garage innovation” I’ve seen. Cool teams, hero devs with proven work on a budget, they all just disappear into the maw of Microsoft or whomever like it’s a black hole, their work never integrated into anything.
US AI is GOING to collapse because we gave all the money to tech bros so they can poison the well. The ML research community has been screaming this since like 2022. And apparently before, as Aaron Swartz allegedly identified Altman as a sociopath right before he died by suicide.
Sorry to rant.
Not that China doesn’t have significant dev issues, to be clear.
Europe, too.
But this is a sensitive point for me. Hobbyist machine learning has been a passion of mine for a decade, and it makes me sick to hear people quote Altman, like throwing GPUs at tech bros going to fix this. That. Is. A. LIE.
I don’t have a solution either. In the AI space, I do not even see a path back to moonshot-style cooperative innovation like the US has repeatedly pulled off before.
If you build a factory someplace, the factory consumes a lot of resources and can be a nuisance. But in return, it provides jobs; at the very minimum. Going beyond that, usually someone in the corporate heirarchy is smart enough to realize that building good will with the neighbors is important and they encourage the employees to give back to the community to that end.
The actual impact may vary but if nothing else, symbolic gestures that say, “we know our presence here has an impact and we want to make sure it’s a positive impact as much as possible.” tend to go a long way in terms of winning support and acceptance from the community.
Data centers consume lots of resources and can be a nuisance. Unlike other operations, they provide very few long term jobs and give basically nothing back to their host community beyond that. They take far more than they give back. If the “geniuses” who run these tech firms spent less money lobbying politicians and instead offered to pay for the college tuition of every student who successfully graduated from the local high school, they would probably get a very different reaction from the public.
Well the people with money don’t care about people. They lobby the politics so they can fuck you over and you are ordered by law to like it
insider info here: many IT companies are using lobbyists to pressure state/local and federal governments on everything from zoning to power distribution.
these aren’t just AI companies, but hosting companies, saas/paas companies, any company with the requirement to build or expand a datacenter.
if you don’t like it, make sure you make it very clear to your representatives what your thoughts are on the subject and what you plan to do otherwise.
Representatives don’t give one fuck about their constituents and what they have to say. They only care about what corporation and billionaire paid them last. And given the 2 party system in the U.S., they don’t have to care about getting voted out either. If they are a Republican in a red district, they can do whatever they want and get voted back in and the same goes for the Democrats.
The ONLY peaceful thing that will save America is getting money out of politics. Until that happens, and good luck with that, your representative will continue to wipe their ass with your concerns.
Agitating nonsense. We stopped data centers in my county by showing up to board meetings and letting them know what we thought. They absolutely cave to pressure, especially local politicians.
They still have to run for reelection and online propaganda bullshit isn’t nearly as effective for local politicians.
Representatives don’t give a fuck what their constituents have to say on social media. It’s full of foreign trolls and bots.
But if you go in person to a town hall / public hearing on an agenda item, they know that you are:
- A real person
- An American
- Extremely likely to vote in the next election.
Source: I successfully killed a local zoning change by convincing my neighbors to go out and speak against it, despite lobbying from a large developer.
