Comment by wat10000
16 hours ago
It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about.
The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon.
The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?
I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger.
If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and who knows, a handful might even go viral on Twitter. Yeah I could do that 5 years ago, but not nearly at the same scale. Maybe a few dozen?
Back to DCs: it’s like saying “well we had coal fire plants years ago.” Ok…well there are more now generating way more power and spewing way more pollution. It’s not the same situation anymore. This DC build out is massive.
I think both sides of the debate are guilty of being too vague about it, probably because being more precise is pretty difficult. "Data centers already existed." "The scale is vastly larger than before." OK, this exchange contains zero new information. "Already existed" doesn't mean it's fine now, and "vastly larger" doesn't mean it's bad now.
This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial public opposition? Citation needed on that part. And any citation that compares current or projected DC activity with past DC activity is missing the point.
Two concrete examples: the above graph showing a multi-fold increase in construction expenditures is useless, because it gives no indication of the absolute significance of the current level. It tells me very little. For a better example, here's a graph of RAM prices over the past year and a half: https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart. Here, we can see that data center buildout is big enough to massively affect the global market for an important commodity, and we can translate that into some sort of understanding of how this affects ordinary people.
I’m not saying anything about opposition. I’m just saying I’m tired of “well people made unwanted porn before” or whatever as if the tools haven’t radially changed.
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