Comment by fourseventy
16 hours ago
You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.
One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
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They also didn't say whether or not they like electric lightbulbs. Or hot showers. Or clothes. Or the wheel.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Turning off the datacenters would be horrible. We would literally be forced to go outside and touch grass. I wouldn't want to live in such a world.
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Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
We had all of that before the current wave of hyperscale data center buildout. So what NEW benefit do i get from all this?
We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs.
Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.
How many racks do you think a niche, text only forum is going to take up?
All of those are the old, smaller scale.
Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing.
AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers.
Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere.
Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
I have a small home server setup. It’s stores all my data, and i can transcode video and stuff on it no problem.
I put in a GPU to run some local LLM stuff. Now the whole thing generates enough heat and noise that I notice it if i sit near the cabinet it’s in.
Scale matters.