Why are they called “data” centers? They’re digital diarrhea centers. There is no “data” here in the sense of anything meaningful.
You might as well buy exabytes of storage, mount it as one volume, and pipe /dev/random to it. Or to be a bit more physical, hook up a noise diode to a nice ADC.
I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.
The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don’t benefit the community at all, they’re just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they’re in. Small wonder communities are against them.
This is what libraries should evolve into.
its all dedicated to peddling AI, google, metal PALANTIR, openai, claude.
Your town definitely hosts services for your local population, just not an entire datacenter’s worth. No single town needs an entire datacenter.
My town does have a website but it doesn’t do much other than list phone numbers and office hours for a few departments. what services are available on it are contracted out to corporate partners. I would not be surprised if the website itself is managed by a corporation as well. It is mostly useless and there is very little motivation to improve it.
But really I’m not really talking about a municipal datacenter, more like a community center or library branch having a digital commons for the neighborhood, with some useful tools, access to reliable data, and maybe some recreational software. Something like what Nextdoor should have been but not enshittified to death by VC.
Digital Oil Rig is such a great analogy for multiple reasons.
Honestly that doesn’t really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.
I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!
isnt thats what PALANTIR is been trying to peddle to trump, its quite odd, more of a conicidenc we started hearing more and more about palantir since last year, when most people dint even notice it existed.
I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a “datacenter”. I don’t really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I’d argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don’t think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.
literally no one calls a single server a datacenter, and there is no reason to. If you did, then you’d just need to come up with a new term for datacenters. for what? Just use the term the way everyone else does.
Well…
A data center is… A data center. So a central plave for data.
It isn’t called Data Warehouse, Data Industrual Plant or Data Mega Shop.
So - if the place is… a central place for the town people’s data (as in OC’s cases)…
Wouldn’t “Data Center” be a fitting name?
I would gladly take a nuclear power plant or oil field in my backyard than a useless AI center that is worse for the environment than those two.
you’re vastly underestimating how destructive a typical oil field is, and overestimating nuclear.
An average oil field will produce tens of millions of barrels of oil per year which releases tens of millions of tons of CO2 per year.
Assuming a worst case datacenter pulling few hundred MW continuously on a coal power grid, it would be a few million tons of CO2 per year, like an order of magnitude less. But most of the time datacenters are running on natural gas which is slightly cleaner and more efficient than coal. And most datacenters are not using hundreds of MW.
As for nuclear, it’s pretty much 100% clean energy after its initial facility construction. Incidentally, they are working on building datacetners with small modular reactors. The benefit there is they can skip connections to the power grid which is the main bottleneck for getting datacenters operational now.
I don’t want a data center in my back yard unless it’s MY data center.
It takes a surprisingly small data center to serve a single house. I run a more reliable streaming service than Netflix from my basement.
With all the tax breaks and investor money that might be cheaper than buying a gaming PC at this point.
You can do a lot if you toss Proxmox on an old gaming computer.
As datacenters engulf more and more resources, corporations are now pushing a lot of them to third world countries under the excuse of giving us digital sovereignty, and we’re falling for it
That’s a lot of city councils betraying their constituency. Wonder what the payoff is, or if it’s a simple matter of human beings avoiding confrontation with people they perceive as being “bigger” than themselves, no payout necessary.
Avoidance of perceived confrontation is and will continue to be our downfall as a civilization.
Groups like the ones pushing data centers can and do literally hire people to figure out how to get in the politicians’ good graces, convince the politicians it is not only a good idea but the best idea, stoke the politicians’ ego(s) such that they think they know best/better than the people they supposedly represent, and then literally train the politicians on how they can do an end run around their constituents to get things passed by the letter of the law but clearly not the intent of the law.
I know Louis Rossman can be a controversial figure due to how he communicates things, but he’s been doing a good job exposing how Flock surveillance cameras are getting passed/governmentally funded in shady ways in numerous jurisdictions where they have negative public support. It would be silly to expect that the tactics they are using are also not in use by the much larger forces with deeper pockets behind all these data center pushes.
I absolutely have less than zero respect for politicians, but I seriously cannot imagine living a life almost entirely surrounded by people deeply trained to manipulate my emotions, sense of self, and self validation towards corporate ends. Beyond all the obvious life experience/world view differences due to wealth and socioeconomic strata, that’s fucking terrifying.
I don’t know why anyone would find Rossman controversial.
He’s great. Gently welcoming you to the show to tell you how you’re getting fucked today. Some attitude on Bambu Labs, but that’s understandable. GemeraNexus is in with him. Can’t imaging Loyal Moses not being so as well.
I’m of that generation that believes when you buy something it is yours. Period. End of sentence. But that’s a GenX thing I think.
To me, the man is stating the obvious. Granted, who knows what mentality corporate America has created in today’s teens and 20-somethings on the topic. Maybe they all just sub to things with little to no hesitation with no resistance, pause, or expectation of better. I don’t know.
It’s a phenomenon called NIMBY and it’s not specific to data centers.
NIMBY is usually more to do with perceived loss in value though no?
People don’t want AI datacenters because they are directly offloading energy costs to neighborhoods via substantially higher power bills. Which is happening because the demand is so high, they can’t compensate by building more power sources in the same time frame.
That and the poor reception to the AI market, which is wrecking jobs, the economy, etc.
Otherwise, datacenters were pretty well known for being built with very little resistance before this, especially since lots of providers, like Google, would fund geopower sources to power their datacenters which would add power to the grid with surplus.
The distinction is that NIMBYs only object to the infrastructure when it’s in their back yard. I think the majority of people object to these data centers anywhere, but only have voting power to directly oppose them in their back yards, so that’s where their effort is spent. I haven’t seen anyone say “I definitely want another massive datacenter to go up, just not here.”
I do, data centers is how we can self host VPNs
Those datacenters are already built, though, and consume a fraction of the power of the new sloppified AI stuff. You can get space in one right now, if you want
How much does colocation end up costing?
I doubt it’d be worth it, but it would be funny to move my dated homelab servers next to some shiny new stuff and get SLA level internet.
