I don't care about pledges. Pledges mean nothing.
US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
141–150 of 265 posts
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#142which means nothing because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increa…
I shall henceforth do the right thing.
Blinded by greed, I have never done it before, but I have seen the light, the bright future that we are all building toward.
From this day forth, I shall be righteous.
In your name, all good things come.
Hallelujah.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#143> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last…
So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?
Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery) capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient by eg choosing cool locations.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#144We already charge different rates for residential vs industrial water usage. Why not do the same here and simply charge them more? The state could also impose a direct data center surcharge on their usage.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#145We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.
I covered my house in solar panels so it’s all irrelevant now.
Soon I’ll get a used EV and cover the garage in panels too so I don’t have to care about wars causing surges in gas prices either.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#146Wait a minute, so who else was paying the bills?
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#147None of what they're pledging is much of a change from how they've already been operating:
- They already invest in new power plants and connection infrastructure when they bring in new datacenters - Electricity for datacenters is based on capacity rather than actual usage - They already have backup generators at most datacenters that they can run during outages. It wouldn't be much work to allow those to feed power back into the grid in extraordinary circumstances - They generally use local contractors to build them for practicality purposes anyway.
This is just some fancy PR and nothing else.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#148Cool. So they’ll build and operate gas turbines (or probably contract operations to do so) and then drive demand on the natgas, as well as over burden the gas delivery networks.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#149The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.
Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.
If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.
the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.
Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
#150Please Democrats don't fuck up the midterms.[1] Take the house and start legislating in favor of the humans. [2]
[1] Narrator: they will [2] Narrator: they won't