The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
berthub.eu

>In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security. While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites.

>Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure.

>Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?

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And then I posted this, based on an HNers post about mapping out Nuclear Power Plants:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189056

[We can easily map the infrastructure of the cloud and AI -- and their supply chains - and these are increasingly of National Security Concern:]

((Not to mention the actual powerplants being built to exclusively provide datacenter power))

Now, if we add the layers of the SubmarinCableMap [0] DataCenterMap [1] - and we begin to track shipments

And

https://i.imgur.com/zO0yz6J.png -- Left is nuke, top = cables, bottom = datacenters. I went to ImportYeti to look into the NVIDIA shipments: https://i.imgur.com/k9018EC.png

And you look at the suppliers that are coming from Taiwan, such as the water-coolers and power cables to sus out where they may be shipping to, https://i.imgur.com/B5iWFQ1.png -- but instead, it would be better to find shipping lables for datacenters that are receiving containers from Taiwain, and the same suppliers as NVIDIA for things such as power cables. While the free data is out of date on ImportYeti - it gives a good supply line idea for NVIDIA... with the goal to find out which datacenters that are getting such shipments, you can begin to measure the footprint of AI as it grows, and which nuke plants they are likely powered from.

Then, looking into whatever reporting one may access for the consumption/util of the nuke's capacity in various regions, we can estimate the power footprint of growing Global Compute.

DataCenterNews and all sorts of datasets are available - and now the ability to create this crawler/tracker is likely full implementable

https://i.imgur.com/gsM75dz.png https://i.imgur.com/a7nGGKh.png

[0] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[1] https://www.datacentermap.com/

> It wasn’t necessary from a technical standpoint to let everything run through the manufacturer’s servers, but it was chosen to do it this way.

(emphasis from article)

I'm working on IoT cloud system. It was chosen to be done this way because netither consumers nor installers have any expertise whatsoever to setup their own network or any devices to be acessible from outside (and they want their panels to be accessible when they are outside their home). I can do it, most readers of HN could do it, but typical consumer or installer can't. Sad but true.

This also makes it simpler from a programming point of view - instead of having separate cloud sync & local control protocols, you just have one local protocol and you merely tunnel it through the (dumb) cloud if you can't connect directly.