371–380 of 514 posts
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Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing. Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
Typically server rooms are currently Fluoro-K / Novec123 if they have space constraints on the suppression systems. Those cylinders take up the least space per cubic foot of protected environments. These are less harmful than previous gasses like Halon, but still not good for the environment.
If you're lucky we get given ample room for cylinders and can go with Argon suppression systems, but that can take up more than 4 or 5 times the space alone and adds a lot of cost in engineering manifolds, etc.
CO2 takes up as much space as Argon systems and will kill someone who doesn't leave the hazard area before release so its generally not used in any datacenter project I've done.
Powerplant's at datacenters often use drychem systems instead or foam releasing systems.
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Success doesn’t always look like lower rates, particularly when demand is ever-growing (even when there aren’t new data centers). Success looks like rates not going up faster than inflation, and reliable delivery. I remember well the rolling blackouts in CA in the late 1990s and that sucked . Even the ones in Texas weren’t that long ago. Also, calling well-intended people with whom you disagree “zombies” is inappropr…
Calling people with valid concerns insulting terms like nimby, and dismissing their reluctance to pay for your personal comfort is not well intentioned. A zombie is an unthinking creature blindly doing thr bidding of it's master. The AI zombies literally just spout the sam altman line without having ever once thought about the thing they are parroting. It's simple, the AI shit is hurting people, real people, right no…
NIMBYs often refuse to accept practically any change, regardless of the benefits. This isn't limited to data centers being sited nearby: You see it in issues as petty as new pickleball courts. We also saw it for new power plants long before modern AI was a factor. This isn't new. I'm not saying you, personally, are a NIMBY, but it's undeniable that they exist. It's not personal, but I can tell it's touched a nerve.
> The AI zombies literally just spout the sam altman line
Well, I'm not one of those "zombies" you refer to, and disagreeing that new data centers are a huge problem, relative to all the other problems happening or threatened in the world, doesn't make me one. I'm not some uncritical fanboy, either; my record speaks for itself.
> the AI shit is hurting people, real people, right now
Back this up with facts. Raise the bar.
> happy about the damage you're helping inflict
What damage? How am I "helping" inflict said damage? Keep in mind that electricity generation need not pollute the atmosphere. We don't need to burn fossil fuels anymore.
You're getting way too personal about this issue and need to back off.
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They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
> will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness. So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration,…
It is central to both OpenAI's and Anthropic's stated mission and either CEO has been discussing this repeatedly.
Examples:
For OpenAI, we have here an "AI job transition framework": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_...
Anthropic has "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"
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Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers. The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base.…
Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing. Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
Amazon also secured a 75% reduction in property taxes for 30 years.
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But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box. I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact wit…
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
Manhattan (or any downtown business district) has lots of office towers with little asphalt, and many (small) businesses that make their living from office workers. Perhaps you are biased towards car-centric design thinking?
Toronto (for one) has condo towers next to (or not far from) business towers so many folks can walk, cycle, or take transit as their commute. And this is not a new concept:
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Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers. The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base.…
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. They're all drain.
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Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children…
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The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they…
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air…