Meta is building several gigawatt-sized data centers to power AI, as reported by Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” to accomplish this feat, with an aim of creating “superintelligence.” The term typically refers to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence across multiple domains. This is something of a holy grail for Silicon Valley tech types.
The first center is called Prometheus and it comes online next year. It’s being built in Ohio. Next up, there’s a data center called Hyperion that’s almost the size of Manhattan. This one should “be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.” Some of these campuses will be among the largest in the world, as most data centers can only generate hundreds of megawatts of capacity.
Meta has also been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and others. Scale AI’s co-founder Alexandr Wang is heading up this effort.
However, these giant data centers do not exist in a vacuum. The complexes typically brush up against local communities. The centers are not only power hogs, but also water hogs. The New York Times just published a report on how Meta data centers impact local water supplies.
There’s a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.
Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. The new centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times. Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county’s entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
This same worrying story is playing out across the country. Data center hot spots in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are also taxing local water reserves. For instance, some Phoenix homebuilders have been forced to pause new constructions due to droughts exacerbated by these data centers.
I don’t think we have to worry about this stuff actually happening. The US economy will collapse before they will pull this stuff off. All this does is accelerate the decline. Its where ridiculous wealth hoarding meets actual scarcity of resources. These people think just because they have money they can get anything they need. They’re reaching a point where they have plenty of money, but the actual resources they need don’t exist. It will cause an economic implosion.
Idk, throwing money and violence at things can be pretty effective.
It can’t materialize matter though. Theres only so much water, minerals, etc to steal via imperialism. And much of what is left for them to steal is protected by actually competent and capable militaries that won’t let them just take it.
I mean, I hope you’re right. But I think you’re being optimistic. Imo, if there’s gonna be a collapse, it’s gonna have to come from revolution else or we’re just gonna get some Mad Max type industrial resource Warlords with the rest of us still fucked into subservience. So, like now, but even more mask off.😅
I think you misunderstood me maybe. That IS likely what it will be like. The conditions in the west are likely to be miserable. The west is not the entire world though. Imperialism is becoming more, and more unsustainable. As the imperialist machine collapses the west will turn inward. Their resources will be limited, but they will go full fash. The rest of the world should be ok. Especially places like China. Because the west will know they can’t really do anything to them.
When i talk about a collapse stopping this project or others like it im talking about a collapse in their ability to command such massive material wealth. The western economies are heavily financialized, and produce very little of value compared to their GDPs. It’s all inflated. As the people with all this money start to want to purchase more material things then actually exist. And they can’t go steal it from somewhere else because they’ve already looted all the easy to steal from nations dry. They’ll turn inward. Start fighting amongst themselves over what they DO have.
If a mega-data center needs X amount of water, and Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc all WANT it. They can’t all have it once that X amount gets big enough. So of course at first it’s simple bidding wars, but eventually it devolves into actual conflict. When they all have endless amounts of money, and the actual material goods are not endless it inevitably turns into armed conflict over those material goods amongst themselves.
Just as in Nazi Germany the colonial practices of europe were brought home to europe the neo-imperialist practices of the US will be brought home to the US. It is already happening in many ways.
I wasn’t saying things would be good. Far from it. I’m saying they’ll be so bad it will be impossible for them to do projects like this. They’ll be far too busy fighting over the scraps of Americas Empire to be building ridiculous things like this anymore.
I think the big things to realize here is that the elites of western society have forgotten what made capitalism work in the first place. It used to be you invested money to MAKE things. You built a factory, made toys, sold the toys, made profits. They’ve created a system now where theyre putting all this money into stuff that doesn’t make anything. Wasting massive amounts of resources on stupid shit that produces nothing of actual value. It will destroy them. Crypto, NFTs, Speculative investing, rent seeking, subscriptions, inflated prices, feature creep, etc. All symptoms of an increasingly financialized economy that is decoupled from actual productive value.
Thanks for clarifying. I get what you’re saying, I’m just not sure I agree that it’s all gonna collapse for them. Personally, I think the elites / global capital is pulling the copper out of the walls both metaphorically and physically in preparation for the shift. Like water may be hard to come by, but with a slave population building desalination centers is ezpz. So is redirecting electronics trash from the third world to the shores of the US for salvage. The people of the US may be isolated but I don’t think elites will be. The elites will just be jet setting around the world doing deals with the liberals of the global south, while we in the US see debtor prisons, company towns, and eventually (beyond even our private prisons) full on chattel slavery. i guess, so far, I just see what’s currently happening as an evolution of the globalization shell game, rather than it being a full collapse of the elites benefitting from imperialism. If that makes sense?
But again, I hope you’re right.
I think the thing your putting too much stock in is the class solitarity of the elites. It’s not as strong these days as they pretend it is. They’ll be fighting amongst themselves openly pretty soon, and other countries elites are gonna become less, and less willing to share with America. The US military is seeming weaker by the day. I mean Yemen, and Iran both held out against it. I just don’t see them playing nice for much longer, and once the rich start fighting eachother their whole house of cards becomes unstable. It’s the perfect time for the working class to but in, and take what we want.
Yeah this seems about as realistic as Neom
When the last tree has been cut down, when the last fish has died, when the last river has dried up, only then will they understand that you cannot eat money.
no, they wont. not even then. they’ll starve to death while screaming about woke, refusing to admit that they’re starving
Personally I will kill them before they get the chance to starve
Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county’s entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
So just tell them no??? I don’t understand what the problem is here. That’s too much water, application denied.
businesses tell the government what to do, not the other way around. do you think we’re living in some kind of commie hellhole where people’s needs and material reality have any impact on how decisions are made?
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Spending $5 Trillion to make a human level AI and he’s dumb as shit
I was curious why they use so much water so I googled.
Why data centers are so thirsty for water
The massive water consumption by data centers stems from their need to maintain optimal temperatures for densely packed servers and computing hardware racks. Just like a car engine, these components generate immense amounts of heat. Overheating can cause system failures, data corruption, and costly downtime. Data centers also use water for humidification systems that maintain a specific humidity range to ensure the functionality of all the equipment in the building.
Keeping temperatures in check requires industrial-scale cooling systems that continuously circulate water. A single data center can have cooling towers that need millions of gallons of water annually to prevent the critical computing infrastructure from overheating.
Artificial Intelligence is Using a Ton of Water. Here’s How to Be More Resourceful
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There’s a graphic…
Heat is the enemy of data operations, reducing their efficiency or even making them inoperable. What creates the heat? The armies of servers gobbling up vast amounts of electricity. What cools it? A variety of technologies, with one, evaporative cooling, requiring significant amounts of water.
[…]
These centers, the beating hearts of the internet, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, sprawl over tens or hundreds of thousands of square feet. At their core are halls filled with identical rows of hundreds of computer servers arranged in aisles – a “cold aisle” where the server draws in cool air, and a “hot aisle” where exhaust is vented.
Thirsty for power and water, AI-crunching data centers sprout across the West
Rant. Google fucking sucks.
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They don’t care if they kill us all. They’re desperate to replace workers, the one threat to their power and resolve the contradiction forever in their favor by moving to some imagined new system. In the end they’ll likely rip each other off but not before killing off a huge number of us. This sucks. And I have little hope Americans will correctly identify the enemy soon enough to matter before tens of millions die. They’ll probably find a release valve by ramping up the imperialism again which is why they’re seizing control of the internet and pumping it full of reactionary content, they plan to make today’s kids into tomorrow’s soldiers lured by the promise of unlimited water if you fight to conquer Africa or Latin America with the US military. Seeing how easy it is for them to get recruits for their ICE stormtroopers from an atomized culture like ours, it’ll be so much easier to direct that violence outwards again. But not before an inward purge I think.
Another thought I just had. Many of us have assumed they can’t really deport all the non-white farm workers because it would collapse agriculture. But what if that doesn’t matter? What if that’s part of getting rid of excess worker capacity they expect to have all too soon by making food scarce and sucking the wealth of workers even more, along with benefit cuts making unemployment a death sentence and increasing desperation. They may actually think that’s a good thing and that the people on benefits, the neuro-diverse especially can be bused and marshaled into the fields eventually after killing off a certain amount and the population will support it continuing once it’s in place for fear of another food price and supply shock occurring over ending it.
How are they going to have an economy when no one can afford to live in it? All these companies need customers to survive.
I feel like your recent economic enterprise has given you a better insight into the minds of these freaks and their investors than the lay hexbear, as I’m sure you need to think like them to make money off them, no? What do you feel like you learned from that exercise about how these lizards view the future of their own industry?
Hogs love stuffing AI into everything no matter how dumb the application is. Markets are not rational at all and every time I thought it would go one way or another based on news or poor earnings I got hosed.
That’s so interesting. So what would you base your moves off of?
many of their companies have been running on nothing more than hype and investments in the hope of future earnings, without turning a profit, so maybe they think this is gonna keep working
eg, tesla sure as fuck wasnt thriving because of its customers. uber wasnt overvalued as hell because of its customers. twitter didnt sell for billions because it had customers.
I simply do not believe the Hyperion data center as currently envisioned and represented in the above image will be built. there’s just no way.
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If China were talking about building it I would believe it would be built to scale and under budget and ahead of time
America is just going to flail about, half build the thing in a way that destroys the environment and wastes a bunch of resources but without actually building it how it’s fucking supposed to be, and it’ll take thirty years to do all that
No it’s posturing for the sake of lobbying and stock prices. Hyperion won’t be built unless it’s funded by our tax dollars.
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I didn’t even have to make an effort to find a very creepy photo of Zuckerberg. All I did was search for zuck smiling and that photo was the top image.
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“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said.
Oh but they do! Not only do they understand it, they’ve factored any resulting opposition to it into their cost analysis (likely as a minor nuisance). What Mike Hopkins, the person who said “they don’t understand” doesn’t understand, is that this is their entire purpose, their goal, but on a scale much larger than merely that of the local community.
I will gladly die of thirst for the chance to see strawberry diaper cat and sexy cat dad the movie in 4k and it’s 48 hours in runtime.
In the hidden war for global dominance AGI is either a digital wunderwaffen that won’t succeed or it’s going to be as significant as the nuclear bomb.
If it does happen hopefully it’s China that hits it first.
Why do the people not just burn down the datacenters? :P
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Yeah and I’m sure the hyperion center will be complete just in time for workers to ride the hyperloop in to work from two states over. This totally isn’t stock market posturing no sir
Tech bros on Reddit said it’s not that bad and taking a bath uses more water
Not only are they building quite possibly the biggest waste of resources in human history, they’re giving them all these dumbass Torment Nexus type names too. I really don’t know how future history books will make sense of this, maybe they’d compare it to Dutch tulip-mania or something? Something that is just so absurd and impossible to even imagine happening unless you’re literally living through it.
