All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?
Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
131–140 of 156 posts
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#132Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#133Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's so retarded. Vote for a government that makes it impossible to build more electricity generation capacity, then cry when electricity prices go up. What the absolute fuck are you talking about? Missouri is solidly Republican run at the state level and they are very friendly to corporations.
The Grain Belt Express has been in limbo for 15 years now, despite backing from Invenergy. It has recently taken hits from President Trump, Senator Hawley, and Missouri's AG. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind...
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#135I wrote below in 2022 on HN [1] when everyone was panicking about AWS growth slowing down. * >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.* 27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 a…
AI's appetite for computation scales with the willingness of their funders to provide heavily discounted tokens to the general public. The basic play here is to get companies to fire people and adapt internal processes to the current heavily subsidized AI farms, and then jack the rates once the switching costs become untenable ... particularly if they can get a huge percentage of human programmers to quit the industr…
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.
Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
> Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
Explain _why_.
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? Meat consumption? Land use regulations? This stuff is just not a drop in the bucket in comparison to the decisions we actually tell our government to make.
Compared to any other electrical system. When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies. And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another…
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to any other electrical system. When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies. And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another…
Do you think that meat consumption doesn't release heat equivalent to the caloric input?
Again, the scale is the issue at hand. These data centers are consuming more supplies and power for something that is not necessary to human existence
Re: Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick. This also applies within co…
> Once you start from destroying democracy This is too unrealistic a statement. Democracy in the US has had some destruction wrought on it since the media started believing that activism and opinion journalism were more important than facts, and that change is the goal of journalism. That's a massive blow to democracy - far greater than anything happening today. We are living in its results. > Autocracies are, in pra…