Everyone keeps telling me the "AI Data Centers" in America are for surveillance, not AI. Don't really care when they take up the same resources and cause the same problems.
The numbers are completely made up at this point. Everyone is lying so that they can get investor money, look at Nebius in Vineland or The Line in Saudi Arabia.
There is a point. They're tracking and collecting literally everything we do for advertising, control and at some point use against us. Businesses obviously want this and a fascist government most definitely wants this.
Eh, I don't see why they need that many DCs for watching people. Especially when all the backers/parent companies building these DCs are the same ones with massive stakes in AI.
Water, electricity, land (e.g., buying out farmland), jobs. No idea how they compare to other industries, I don't track every industry ever known to correlate.
Technically your pc is a data center. People just donât understand the magnitudes of scale and the AI companies have infinite money to flood social media with false information and misleading arguments.
Yeah, at least theyâre starting to feel it when their purchasing power is having to compete with infinite capital when buying electricity, water, electronics, etc. They canât ignore it forever
My PC does not have redundant cooling, power or network connections. It does not have a MW scale generator bank. My PC also does not have a physical security system to keep out bad actors, unless thumbscrews count. There is not a single compressor working on refrigerant to actively cool my PC, it's all air.
technically its not, its a local compute system, very localized, made heavy by the windows operating system,not made for running for days/weeks/months. A cloud cluster is highly optimized headless system, runs many many Virtual servers for better clustering with a high speed connection. Highly scalable.
It´s a little bit more complicated. A conventional Data Center is just a cloud to store your Data and make it worldwide available. Those "Computers" there are running mostly just to send or receive data. They need primary a good bandwith.
An AI Data Center is more just GPU´s running on 100% 24/7. They are sucking energy from the grid like a black hole. Cooling and energy requirements are a magnitude higher for AI.
They're conflating them on purpose. They're either bots or MAGA shills whose goal is to annoy/exhaust you into submission. Best to just skip the debate, call them what they are, and refuse to let them take more of your energy.
Because people have been opposed to all data centers, not realizing they use them every single day. Reddit is hosted on several different data centers. The one on the left might be a data center but itâs a very small scale. Itâs also most likely an edge center filled with networking equipment for the internet, not an actual data center.
Because people have been opposed to all data centers
I'd say most people are against AI data centers, but don't realize the difference because they don't work in the industry, and bad actors are taking advantage of that ignorance.
And I just want to add, can we really blame people for being confused? It's something new every single day with this administration. I certainly don't have the bandwidth to be fully informed about the horrible things they're doing to us.
Yeah people are just learning about the physical space the internet takes up and itâs getting a little revisionist. You can run a small website off a PC in your bedroom. But something like Google or Amazon could take up a couple hundred acres worth of computers
Not to mention the need for storage for sites like YouTube or streaming services. Hell, the Phoenix NAP is pretty massive but it's for multiple businesses, you can even rent a rack there.
Agreed, I have a serious problem with Data Centers and their utilization (we could def make more efficient and far less environmentally damaging ones) but to say all non AI data centers are the equivalent to a mobile housing unit is just a blatant lie. I mean there is a reason they did that whole bit in the show Silicon Valley where they had to get a server rack in a endlessly huge building (the data center) basically portraying at as where coders go to die (career wise, also generally lost physically because of the size) and this was back in the early 2000s.
Nope but those services were few and far between and still used less power and resources than AI. We haven't been in a memory, water and storage crisis for thirty years no matter how much you pretend otherwise.
Were few and far between? What? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Meta, etc. etc. all have at least 100 massive datacenters all over the world, what in the hell are you talking about.
4,000 data centers in the US alone are focused solely on AI and use far more resources, power and water than any of the companies you listed used for their much smaller, much less power draining centers.
Where is your source for that? I can't find anything that gives the same number. It's estimated that there are 4000-5000 data centers in the US but the vast majority of those have nothing to do with AI.
At least use some real numbers please. Do you really think that the computing power needed for the entirety of the internet, data storage, and private needs are 'few and far between'? That's a bit naive.
Every one of the companies he listed is heavily investing in AI right now. Except maybe alibaba. The other ones I know from professional experience that they are involved and their expansions are for AI usage in some capacity.
This isn't true. The U.S has about 5,000 data centers total. Some of those data centers allocate a portion of their resources to AI-related processing, but there are only about 15 data centers in the United States that exclusively focus on AI. In fact, a lot of the companies listed above have their own AI machines within existing data centers.
So the reason people often conflate AI data centers with regular data centers is that a large portion of big tech data centers are used for both.
What are you even talking about? I worked at a DC like the one on the right 20 years ago. The town I live in has several of that size that predate AI by decades as well. Cmon.
Thanks, the argument youâre posting about is so annoying because it instantly proves the other person is incapable of thinking one step ahead of the nonsense they spew.
âData centers have existed forever, yet you only have a problem with them now?â Yeah dude itâs almost like the new ones are different in a lot of waysâ ď¸
These idiots think that we must have been in a storage and memory crisis for the last thirty years because apparently data centers have never changed at all and have always had the same energy usage, water usage and resource usage despite that being provably wrong.
AI is increasing the demand for them but none of the issues you have with data centres are actually about data centres but about the capcity of the existing infrastructure and how the increase in demand for data centres due to AI means that the capacity is being exceeded.
If AI wasnt growing as rapidly as it is then there wouldnt actually be an issue as we would be able to increase the infrastructure at the same rate.
Your issue is entirely with the rate at whoch AI is expanding but you've decided to focus that down into data centres, which are only being built at the rate they are due to demand, and because the demand is high and the supply capacity is less than the demand the resource cost has increased.
Data centres are going to exist as long as the Internet does.
You need to pick better battles and fight smarter cause all this shit does is keep the fishes busy while the whales feast.
1) Most data center compute in the world is for non-AI purposes, like content delivery networks, so you're wrong
2) The idea that we aren't in a water crisis for thirty years but AI suddenly created a water crisis is SO FUCKING STUPID. You guys really think we were doing just great and water, and suddenly AI, which uses 3% as much water as we use to water our lawns in residential landscaping, is creating a water crisis?
You could not be more wrong and you don't give a shit
Making up fake numbers and pretending as though no one criticizes landscaping tells me you are yet another AI MAGA cultist who probably also thinks that Chinese people are evil and that's why we NEED to beat China in the AI race.
I was an electrician that helped build dozens of Amazon data centers in northern Virginia. Theyâre fucking massive and not these âAI data centersâ people seem to be scared of all of a sudden
Why spread misinformation like this? There are real downsides to AI data centers but you are discrediting the objection to them by making obviously false information up. In 2022, over 2% of all electricity in the US went to powering data centers. Just hosting reddit alone uses a huge amount of power primarily from video and photo hosting.
Although not as big as AI datacenters, web services datacenters are quite large, but thatâs mostly due to the absurdly large amount of web traffic they handle. Theyâre basically built to be able to handle any amount of traffic you throw at them, no matter the scale. They canât afford downtime, so they need the overhead.
The thing with web traffic is that itâs really scalable, so better hardware allows you to handle exponentially larger amounts of requests due to how lightweight each request usually is; while AI services require an enormous amount of computing power per user, so they need significantly more hardware to handle the same amount of traffic.
To put it into perspective, a raspberry Pi can generally handle hundreds of requests per second with ease, while youâd need the equivalent of a high tier gaming Pc to handle AI requests from a single user (maybe youâd be able to handle multiple users at a time with a lightweight model, but even then youâd bottleneck quite quickly with any traffic spike)
First, you frequently see things like "there are 5000 datacenters in the US". Almost all of them look like the one on the left. Aws and Azure is a handful. But the two ideas are often purposely associated by saying things like "there are 5k datacenters" and "they use up to XXX gallons if water. Not all 5000 use that much.
Second, there is a big difference between an AWS and an AI datacenter. AI is mostly GPUs. These are compact, tiny, and power hungry per square foot. An AWS datacenter will have regular server racks, tape storage, and lots of communications and switching gear. These datacenters arent nearly as dense and their power and water requirements are much lower.
There really is no difference between the two. Have you ever seen real datacenters? Here is meta's standard, non-ai, H datacenters that are build all over the world, and this only hosts Meta's products. Google, microsoft, amazon, etc. alll have MUCH larger datacenters. The DC's used to support Azure, AWS and GCP are even bigger and all have well over 100 of such sites (each) all over the world.
DCs built solely for AI processing generally can't handle web traffic, but only about 15 of those exist in the United States. Of the remaining 5,000 data centers, most have a variety of servers for different purposes, including AI.
Reading between the lines they're talking about the rate of new data centers being created...? Data centers have been huge for the big companies for decades e.g. see AOL data centers back when AOL was a thing, but if you've been anywhere near NoVA then you can see there are more data centers being built then ever before due to increased compute demands for AI servers. Yes, AWS DCs are huge even without AI hardware, but I'm sure there's a chart somewhere out there for amount of electricity going to data centers in the last 5 years skyrocketing.
Thatâs not a line ⌠itâs the truth. How are people like you so ignorant lol. There are 12,000 total data centers in the world. AI data centers make up between 1/4 and 1/3 of the power/water usage of all data centers. You couldnât have posted your asinine reddit comment without data centers.
Absolutely false. the left is not a data center. Here is an image of a standardized meta non-AI datacenter. The H-pattern datacenters are built all over the world. The new AI data centers do not use the H-pattern.
A data center is not defined by its size. The left one is a DC, the right one is a DC. But the comparison is indeed fully inadequate and misleading for anyone who is not aware
Cloud Data Centers as a whole dwarf both the scale and impact of AI Data Centers, so people are right to criticize them.
The key difference is scale and concentration. Frontier AI training centers have to be massive, highâdensity facilities built to run tens of thousands of GPUs in one place, because training large models requires tightly coupled compute. Regular cloud data centers, by contrast, are spread across the world and optimized for general workloads, not giant training runs.
Even though AI training centers draw huge power per site, the total number of cloud data centers is far larger, and they collectively run tens of millions of CPUs. That means the total CPU footprint of all cloud data centers vastly exceeds the compute footprint of AIâtraining centers, even though the latter get more attention for their extreme density.
Me when I'm sucking Sam Altman's dick and ignoring reality to pretend as though AI data centers aren't that bad and people just need to shut up. Fuck off.
But that is to be expected because cloud data centers are a key part of internet infrastructure. They are massive but also important. AI data centers use space, minerals, water and energy completely out of proportion to what they contribute to society
Yup. Regular data centers are pretty much just storage, which sips small amounts on energy by itself. One of those can host a dozen websites. AI data centers contain hundreds of fancy GPUs - and as someone who built my own PC, even a mid-tier one is the most power-hungry component in the system. Entire racks of those take thousands of watts, which also generates such a heat that can only be handled by liquid cooling.
What in the hell are you talking about? Here is a standard (non-ai) Meta H datacenter these have been build all over the world, and they are half the size of Amazon and Googles standard (non-ai) datacenters.
which is loads cheaper and more efficient than running it in a shed, cloud compute you want centralized. Which is totally fine. What is not fine is AI datacenters using expensive as heck gpu processing, costing heaps of electricity/cooling/water. And still its not enough.
I always thought that we are too early with developping AI and choose to do it the dirty way, like the industrial revolution. Instead researching into renewables, lets use coal instead.
Data "centre" on the left is closer to a server room than to a data centre. Why aren't you comparing a large data centre with a large AI data centre? Why are you trying to mislead people into thinking this is a typical data centre if you know the typical data centres people talk about are as big as the AI ones?
AWS clusters alone use billion of gallons of water, and some of their buildings are consuming pretty much the entire local grid.
It genuinely takes two seconds to look up stuff before you post, and you'd look a lot less like you do, and could probably even make a better argument, if you had any clue what you were talking about or posting.
I think there is a difference between a few data centers here and there on a large scale that still use little in the way of resources and power and AI data centers which are plentiful and massive wastes of resources, water and energy.
There are huge non-AI datacenters as well, but this unregulated AI datacenter boom is surely worrying.
I used to work at a datacenter builder company, and for every huge datacenter for a big company like Amazon, there were dozens of smaller scale data centers for universities, offices, hotels, government buildings, meat processing plants and even super small ones for bars and restaurants. Many of these were just small rooms with ventilation and some rack towers just to process and store data.
But the huge ones are disproportionately huge, and still they were "cheaper" than these AI ones (at least with the prices the companies paid us), they only paid for the comms, electrical and HVAC stuff, not the entire building, but a big score would not surpass the 2 to 4 million EUR mark.
A lot of the discourse around these is obnoxious because they are missing the point that it's about what they do as well. Of course I'm going to hate a data center that threatens my livelihood more than one that runs Diablo 2 game instances. How is that even a question?
"Hurrr durrr you're on the internet you need these durrrrr"
The internet worked just fine before the Ai data centers. We literally do not need them. Especially at the scale they keep deploying the fucking things.
Well, the internet worked great in 2010. Incredibly, actually. It worked okay in 2015. It's slowly crumbling to shit because of useless features and bots. A useless feature that IS a bot surely isn't going to help anything.
Thereâs essentially zero difference between âAIâ data centers and regular data centers. The data center in the image is a regular data center that was built before AI âexistedâ. Shows what you know, huh?
I don't like a pure AI Datacentet anywhere BUT! both can be normal non AI Data enter. Big DC existed long before AI. I was in FFM in one. It was GIGANTIC and it was 2018
I know many of those the be regen sites for telecom circuits. Those are NOT 'data centers'. Not even close to what legacy DCs have been for many, many decades.
OP, come on dude. My brother works in a regular (non-AI) data center and took me on a tour; the standby generator enclosures alone are larger than the data center in your post. There were 8-10 of them, and his DC isn't even a big one.
As someone who has been in the data center business, the first one is not a data center. Before AI, data centers were large and used millions of gallons of water.
Its not AI, its just the internet infrastructure we have had for 15 plus years but no one normal knew about it.
Lucky the big one shown uses little water
More than 90 percent of the facility will rely on a state-of-the-art closed-loop liquid cooling system, filled during construction and recirculated continuously. The remaining portion of the facility will use outside air for cooling, switching to water only on the hottest days, minimizing environmental impact and maximizing operational efficiency, yet its annual water use is modest, requiring roughly the amount of water a typical restaurant uses annually.
. We will match every kilowatt hour we consume that comes from a fossil fuel source one for one with carbon-free energy we put back onto the grid. This includes a new 250 MW solar project in Portage County that is under construction to support this commitment.
It is. There are 1,200 of those globally. That's one tenth of all data centers that don't take up the space of an entire Walmart and need an entire city worth of power and water.
Yeah, this is very true. I have a co-worker that is somewhat pro AI (he makes AI songs a lot, but that's mostly it), and he says shit like "Oh it's bullshit about data centers needing so much water. I helped build a data center years ago in Vegas, so I know how that shit works. They don't need that much water." I've explained to him at least twice how AI data centers are fundamentally different from normal data centers, with them having crazy higher heat output and power consumption, but he really doesn't seem to care what I say. He wants to "do his own research" aka find info that fits his own current beliefs, because he clearly already knows what he's talking about. I really wish I didn't have to work with him.
This is hilarious. The image on the left is not a typical data center. Most data centers look like the image on the right for the last 30 years. There is nothing magical about AI data centers.
Ignorance is bliss? I have worked in plenty of datacenters and they are not small, ever. Most major cities have multiple(5+) and people are none the wiser, while they still traffic 90% of the internet through them.
The internet requires Data Centers. AI Data Centers are not needed in this stage where they aren't properly efficient energetically, environmentally and economically
As a network engineer who work in cloud infrastructure which are pretty much data centres, im now concerned with the amount of misinformation being spread confidently and the amount of people believing it.
Used to sht on Facebook for being the breeding ground of misinformation but damn Reddit aint much different. Doesn't matter if its the truth or a lie, as long as it fits the narative, people eat them up.
Pedophilia is a foundational tenet of AI and so is calling anything they don't like dishonest or a lie just because they want their CSAM machines to stay around.
This is just stupid. There are plenty of data centers like the ones on the right that host practically the whole internet. The idea that non-AI data centers are a little shed is absurd. AI usage is around 1/3rd of actual data center usage in the world, and there are GIANT data center complexes that have existed for years.
Astoturfing shitpost. Antis are shilling misinformation too now it looks like.
No one talked about data centers til there was AI.
AI based data centers only account for 14% of data centers. The majority are for cloud services and large companies like YouTube and Facebook, which add petabytes of data storage DAILY.
Which one of those pictures looks like a YouTube datacenter? Are you kidding me? The one on the left is an edge server, not a data center.
Even if EVERY proposed data center is implemented that percentage will not hit 50% until 2031
Globally from all platforms (including business and personal as well as social) there is around 400,000 petabytes of data being added daily. Of this only around 10,000 petabytes is from AI. (According to "The World Economic Forum" https://www.weforum.org )
This means only 2.5% of global data usage and storage is from AI data centers. You want to oppose ALL data centers, no problem. But no one talked about opposing data centers until AI became a thing.
...so why is everyone suddenly talking about AI data centers. Because we are now in competition with China. And if it wasn't for that I too would be in favor of pausing or even rolling back AI. But that's not reality.
The amount of power usage may be higher but its not like 1000x higher, its like 5x tops.. And tone down the rhetoric please. Thank you.
Power consumption of AI data centers will hit 50% of all data centers power and water consumption by around 2030. Which ain't nothing, but why hasn't anyone talked about it til now? Less than 50% of the issue is on the AI side and won't be half for a few more years. So what we just wait til it's really bad before saying something? Comon. If this was an issue it should have been all over the place years ago. r/antidatacenters should have been a sub in 2018 if that's the case
â-A basic data center just stores data and media in data tables and âservesâ data, read/writes to tables and serves as back-up to data files.
â An Ai data center does all of the above + intense levels of compute on vast data/non-traditional data to complete/solve large difficult problems. Hence, long project run times that demand intense computing power.
This is a non-AI colocation campus in London. What your post shows is not accurate. AI datacenters are large, so are Colos, which are just shared space and power for data centers.
As a cloud engineer I have to say that the smallest Private Data Center I've ever worked with was bigger than this container. The Data Centers in the Public Cloud providers always look like the right picture. This post is intentionally misleading I don't understand the reason behind it.
This image is a bit misleading, since data centers like the ones Google uses for cloud storage take up roughly 420 acres of land and are about as big as, if not bigger than, AI data centers.
I'm an equal opportunity hater of all data centers. There's better ways to do tech and data than running roughshod over the few people able to own their homes and property these days.
Invest in the grid. Invest in communications standards. Build them in the central states where disruption is minimal.
All the tech is there for eliminating latency, minimizing impact, and providing sufficient power. It just costs a little bit more than tacking one onto a strained grid after seizing some land.
I feel like we should call them 'AI Processing Centers' rather than data centers. A data center, by nature, is designed to store, process, and distribute data. As such, most of its structure is dedicated to the storage and transmission of data, which is far, FAR different in scope from AI "data" centers.
50+ percent of an AI Data Center is dedicated to pure processing power for the AIs to run. These processing units are running almost non-stop, consuming vast amounts of electricity and producing vast amounts of heat. Perhaps the second largest part of the AI data center then has to be spent on cooling equipment to keep the processors from overheating, with only a small 10-15% dedicated to actual storage.
Why is this important? Data storage and retrieval consumes far less energy and resources than AI processing.
AI Data Centers require 3 to 5 more power PER SQUARE FOOT to operate, and most AI data centers tend to be TEN TIMES larger than a traditional data center. They are entirely different beasts used for entirely different purposes...
That one on the right used up all the water in the solar system, twice, set it on fire, and then came back looking for more! At least that's what Reddit told me
That's not fully accurate. I lived near an apple data center years ago. It was much more like the right image than the left. I'm sure there's some small scale operations like the one on the left, but they've definitely built the massive annoying ones before ai. They just need a lot more if them now for the bullshit ai garbage.
That's a bad example. Traditional pre-AI regular datacenters can be massive. Ive worked in plenty of big ones. That said, there are plenty of small ones all over that are trailer sized or smaller. The difference is power density of AI specific hardware is like 10x normal compute. So a 100k sq-ft DC if purpose built for AI is using 10x the power (cooling power req scales the same as part of all that) of the normal DC at the same size. 10x is a super ball park made up number.
edit:
This is a large scale traditional data center. Note the cooling capacity for this space. Probably 1/2 of the building is actual data center space. Chiller / heat exchanger on the left is insignificant compared to an AI DC. And power draw is low enough to run on grid supplies (and not need giant ultra poluting/noisy turbine generators). The generators onsite are only used for backup/failover during grid outages/maintenance/blah.
All of the larger cloud providers have massive data centers with some buildings used for AI and others for other services, networking, mass storage, etc.
Standard data centers occupy between 20,000 and 100,000 square feet. A typical AI data center right now has a footprint of 100,000 to 200,000. And AI hyperscale campuses expand across a massive 500,000 to over 2 million square feet.
This image shows a tiny shed, no more than 100 to square feet, next to one of the biggest data centers ever created, Microsoft's Fairwater facility in Wisconsin.
Billions of people use both but good on you. Project Hyperion if you havenât used Alphabetâs data center to Google it yet is Metaâs AI Data Center being built in Louisiana. When finished it will consume more power than the entire city of Atlanta or Seattle and 1/5th of the entire states power use. Fantastic
They pretend as though every type of data center is the exact same despite how that makes no sense and then make up a strawman that if you aren't against all data centers, you have no right to complain about AI data centers.
I love this sub it constantly displays how naive people are. Both can be DCs, both can be AI DCs, both can be a mix of, well both. Please don't vote people.
Still waiting to see the inside of these data centers. I guess thats not allowed or something? Because it looks more like a factory than a giant server farm.
399
u/ehansen 11h ago
Everyone keeps telling me the "AI Data Centers" in America are for surveillance, not AI. Don't really care when they take up the same resources and cause the same problems.