I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.
The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don’t benefit the community at all, they’re just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they’re in. Small wonder communities are against them.
This is what libraries should evolve into.
You know, I think we could try building libraries with a dedicated community server that has just enough LLM voodoo to summarize the books in stock for the public to get an idea of what’s available
Maybe it’s a huge overstep versus what we can already do with more “analog” technology, but I could see potential in this
Eh, if it ran on solar and all it was trained on was maybe the library’s own database of book summaries or something, then why not? That could be cool.
Honestly that doesn’t really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.
I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!
I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a “datacenter”. I don’t really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I’d argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don’t think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.
literally no one calls a single server a datacenter, and there is no reason to. If you did, then you’d just need to come up with a new term for datacenters. for what? Just use the term the way everyone else does.
And yet, they’re still being built. Because money is power, and we have neither.
Why are they called “data” centers? They’re digital diarrhea centers. There is no “data” here in the sense of anything meaningful.
You might as well buy exabytes of storage, mount it as one volume, and pipe /dev/random to it. Or to be a bit more physical, hook up a noise diode to a nice ADC.
I don’t want a data center in my back yard unless it’s MY data center.
I would gladly take a nuclear power plant or oil field in my backyard than a useless AI center that is worse for the environment than those two.
you’re vastly underestimating how destructive a typical oil field is, and overestimating nuclear.
An average oil field will produce tens of millions of barrels of oil per year which releases tens of millions of tons of CO2 per year.
Assuming a worst case datacenter pulling few hundred MW continuously on a coal power grid, it would be a few million tons of CO2 per year, like an order of magnitude less. But most of the time datacenters are running on natural gas which is slightly cleaner and more efficient than coal. And most datacenters are not using hundreds of MW.
As for nuclear, it’s pretty much 100% clean energy after its initial facility construction. Incidentally, they are working on building datacetners with small modular reactors. The benefit there is they can skip connections to the power grid which is the main bottleneck for getting datacenters operational now.
Greenwashing of nuclear.
all the sudden, everybody is a NIMBY 🙄
I do, data centers is how we can self host VPNs
Those datacenters are already built, though, and consume a fraction of the power of the new sloppified AI stuff. You can get space in one right now, if you want
That assumes that demand is constant, and it is not. More people get online every day
It’s a phenomenon called NIMBY and it’s not specific to data centers.
The distinction is that NIMBYs only object to the infrastructure when it’s in their back yard. I think the majority of people object to these data centers anywhere, but only have voting power to directly oppose them in their back yards, so that’s where their effort is spent. I haven’t seen anyone say “I definitely want another massive datacenter to go up, just not here.”
