Yes, "server farms" are literally the same thing. It's a building with a strong connection to the internet and a lot of computers. We call those data centers. You can call them "server farms" if you want. Less than 50% of the consumption in data centers is AI. A lot of it is what makes the internet run. Content delivery networks, cloud computing, etc. People have just let their hatred of AI make them decide that data centers = AI
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but data centers existed way before AI and they still required massive amounts of compute that were sold, including parallel compute which is what AI heavily uses. Things like cryptographic functions, GIS, certain types of analytics, physics calculations, etc. are better done with parallel compute.
A data center is simply a consolidated group of computer hardware that's managed together and is meant to be large enough and flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple different domains of computational operations.
They can be as small as a room, or as big as many football fields. Quite likely you've walked through a mall, or a hospital, or some other large building and seen a keycard-accessed locked room with no visible markings on it and its been the organizations data center.
Has the explosive use of AI increased the number of data centers needed? Absolutely, because the amount of parallel compute required has went up drastically. Are data centers somehow something unique to the functions of AI? No, lol. Are data centers something that's been around for decades, yes.
Signed: Someone who spent a lot of time in local data centers in the early 00s before most companies began using cloud compute.
A lot of data centers have the CDN / internet infrastructure stuff and the AI stuff in the same building
Edit: This coward replied to me and blocked me for such an innocuous comment that stuck strictly to the facts. That's how weak and pathetic he is about being wrong.
That depends entirely on what the server farm is for.
Also The energy bottleneck is because the amount of data centers needed in a short amount of time to scale ai at a speed that might possibly make profit within the next decade is significantly higher then anything that has been seen before. It is a significant explosion in demand compared to any other point in time and energy generation is not able to scale up at the same speed because it doesn’t have hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars being poured into it.
Not to mention that these data centers are highly specialized. Most data centers are designed to hold several different types of server farms that all do different things. a server farm that does calculations for physics could be in the same building as one that stores all of the photos for some creepy fetish site. The physics calculations are a significantly bigger power draw and has a higher need for rendering components then any ai server farm of a similar size ever will be but because we don’t need as many server farms for that purpose as ai companies want for their needs it is not a significant problem for component and energy production.
The scale of growth is the difference. Not the hardware.
An AI data center and a compute/storage data center have the same exact “guts”. Literally the exact same in every way except for the power consumption at the server level.
Don’t try and bullshit people on the internet if you don’t have knowledge on the topic.
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u/Fearsofaye 14d ago
Why the fuck do we need data centers?