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U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

tomshardware.com

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Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#121

Post by ETH_start »

Hamstringing the build out of AI compute facilities in the United States is strategic suicide.

AI compute is a major emerging export industry and the United States is very well positioned to dominate it, unlike mass manufacturing. If it cannot take advantage of its unique strength in AI compute, then it is going to lose the global economic race.

AI compute is the first major expansion of physical capital in the United States since the post-war era. Decades of outsourcing and downsizing are finally reversing and helping spur a constellation of supporting industries, like gas turbine manufacturing, a scaling up of energy production and upgrades in the telecommunication infrastructure, in building out high-capacity data links.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#122

Post by whatsThisBtn4 »

Guthwine wrote: post #99
whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #79

[flagged]

Your account was created <1 month ago, you have made ~25 comments and at least 4 of them mention China. You doth protesting too much?

Wait, you didn't read the news articles that China is using United States social media astroturfing to undermine the United States on data centers?

I thought people on HN kept up with this.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#124

Post by Zambyte »

GPerson wrote: post #111
Zambyte wrote: post #24

It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know…

You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market by providing AI for the people who like AI. The whole plan is to replace all white collar work with AI. This requires more data centers. The people who benefit the most from this will see the least of the negative effects.

You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market, full stop. It's just a straight up pipe dream. If everyones jobs are automated away, there won't be any customers for the products and services provided by the companies that are fully automated by AI.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#125

Post by Zambyte »

bamboozled wrote: post #88
Zambyte wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is anti pollution argument pro ai? What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who complain about pollution are usually mostly concerned about AI, and they use arguments of pollution to strengthen their argument against AI related things.) > And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models. No, and training does use a large a…

It’s wild to accuse people who are anti pollution of being anti ai, look how fucked the climate is, people don’t want to see it more fucked , is that hard to understand ?

It's not hard to understand. What's hard to understand is why when I bring up how cars are literally orders of magnitude larger polluters and how we need to eradicate personal car use, people suddenly stop caring about pollution, and continue to beat the anti-AI drum.

See: they were anti-AI the whole time, and pollution was just an attempt at supporting their anti-AI argument.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#126

Post by jayGlow »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #86
goda90 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part confuses you? The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply? The water, light and noise pollution? The threat to jobs? The threat to truth and transparency? The threat to privacy?

> stable and affordable electricity and water supply Look, I think you misspelled "demand" there. It's an understandable error; those keys are so close together. Data centers present a demand on resources. A demand that wasn't there previously. You hook a DC up to the grid, and it will demand more electricity from existing generation capability. The DC proposals, without provision for their own generation, present ex…

if there is extra demand then typically more infrastructure is built to increase supply. we were able to increase it to meet the power consumption demands of manufacturing its only recently that we actually stopped improving our capacity. Increased demand here would actually drive us to increase our capacity instead of stagnating.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#127

Post by digitaltrees »

budman1 wrote: post #74
digitaltrees wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not degrowth. It’s anti monopoly, anti wealth concentration. Anti tax avoidance. Anti price on water and electricity. Anti raising the ambient temperature of a community. Let’s put the data center in Palo alto or Atherton.

Not being from silicon valley, I am not sure of the communities mentioned. But may I suggest we put it right next to Zuck's house? How about in SamA's back yard? They are noisy buildings, designed to turn electricity into heat. And provide a small number of jobs.

Those are their neighborhoods

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#128

Post by preg_match »

consensus1 wrote: post #41
consp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.

People complain when you hook them up to the high efficiency generators that power the grid, so this is what they get.

It's very simple: just take some of the existing capital and invest it towards the grid, then build the datacenter. The problem with the grid isn't electricity stealing. It's that the grid literally cannot support the amount of datacenters being built. It's not a matter of opinion, just numbers.

So why won't AI companies do just that, invest in the grid? Well they want the datacenters now, not 10 years from now. I think they're all terrified investor capital will dry up at any moment, so they have to expend as much capital as possible, as fast as possible. That's stupid of course, but that's how they operate.

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#129

Post by jayGlow »

vrganj wrote: post #23
flanked-evergl wrote: post #4

This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.

Why would people possibly not want something that uses up water in times of constant draught, uses up energy in an energy crisis and pollutes the air and contributes to climate change in times of climate catastrophe, all so a few already way-too-rich dudes can become even richer? It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!

I always hear about how concerned everyone is about water usage from data centers, however I haven't heard any of these people mention the amount of water we lose to leaking pipes. we lose 3x the amount of water to leaking pipes as data centers would use so if they're so concerned about water usage wouldn't fixing those be higher priority?

Re: U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

#130

Post by gopher_space »

Gormo wrote: post #117
defrost wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers" Clearly you don't. For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.

> Clearly you don't. Obviously, since I'm the one discussing it here. The broader question is whether the people who are conflating them together are doing so out of honest confusion or out of ulterior motives. > For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory an…

The people presenting these different concerns are all individuals with their own agendas. You're the person lumping them all into one confusing mass so you don't have to deal with each viewpoint.

When people are assholes across multiple domains they get pushback from each of them. This isn't emergent behavior, it's emergent consequences.

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