131–140 of 152 posts
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Did our demand for social media apps suddenly blow up? Because our DC demand seems to be blowing up.
You'd think the datacenter boom would have happened during COVID when everyone was stuck at home ordering everything online, streaming everything and doing zoom calls all day as they work from home.
But the fact that it's happening now is weird. Everyone I know has cooled on AI, even my most AI loving friends are no longer using it for art, porn or therapy.
So is it all speculative? Companies hoping to get in on the "AI goldrush"?
Could this be nefarious? Instead of one big underground secret military datacenter, distribute a resilient network of regular datacenters all around the country that are also used for civilian purposes.
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The mass data center build out is only partly driven by AI. There is a big cloud capacity crunch across the big providers, has been for a while and it is getting worse.
There is no cloud capacity crunch, what a bunch of hog wash. What we've mostly got are some of the most inefficient systems on the planet where consumers are also building some of the most inefficient projects on top of it. There is no real effort being put towards maximizing the amount of resources you can get out of hardware, the game for the entire duration of our industry has been throwing more money to buy more…
I’m in this boat myself on a micro scale: I run a fleet of GPU servers for my SaaS and I know that I could improve the efficiency of what I’m running on them by 20% or more, but it’s far cheaper and more effective in the short run to just throw more hardware at the problem than for me to spend weeks or months overhauling things. At some point the scales may tip, but right now hardware is still cheaper than my time is.
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If this is the case why would local officials permit them?
Why do members of congress end up with more wealth than their salary could justify?
Maybe if someone is in Congress, they can skirt the law around lobbyist gifts due to your position of power, but 1. it doesn't sound very plausible that someone becomes a multimillionaire by squirreling away illegal gifts or campaign funds and 2. to become I doubt small town city councils making these decisions are in a similar place. Most of reality is boring and not like the movies.
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Still very few for deserving a tax break based on potential employment opportunities. A DC simply doesn't help the local economy, it's very often a net-negative: it's very resource-intensive while not generating much in terms of economical activity for where it sits at. In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.
They consume land? Where does the land go?
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There is no cloud capacity crunch, what a bunch of hog wash. What we've mostly got are some of the most inefficient systems on the planet where consumers are also building some of the most inefficient projects on top of it. There is no real effort being put towards maximizing the amount of resources you can get out of hardware, the game for the entire duration of our industry has been throwing more money to buy more…
So why don’t these orgs who are voracious for profits just rewrite things to be more efficient? Probably because rewriting things also uses a scarce resource: organizational attention. I’m in this boat myself on a micro scale: I run a fleet of GPU servers for my SaaS and I know that I could improve the efficiency of what I’m running on them by 20% or more, but it’s far cheaper and more effective in the short run to j…
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There are differences in types of data centers and hyper scale data centers are extremely different than what you're imagining.
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You're a great imperialist but like a bad human...
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I'm curious how the HN zeitgeist hates datacenters so ferociously yet every third article posted to the front page is 800 comments beating off to a new Claude feature. It's mind-boggling.
Half the traffic on this site are real, intelligent humans (among whom opinion is split different ways on the AI topic), a quarter of the traffic is propagandists trying to destroy western tech/infrastructure/society (notice how China apparently doesn't have to stop AI development or datacenter development, only the West does), and the remaining quarter is real humans who have been utterly consumed by the previously…
Clearly you're in the last quarter of the demographic described.