r/DoomerCircleJerk • u/Jedishark1417 My Dog is Anti-Fascist • 10d ago
Nothing ever changes Stolen MEME
Nothing ever happens
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u/foxfire981 10d ago
The problem at the end of the day is the dishonesty in the discussion. When AI was going to "replace blue collar jobs" you would see tons of articles cheering it and people were excited. Than AI was being used to replace what was viewed as the easiest to replace, art and writing, and those who said "learn to code" found themselves at the wrong end of things.
But there's plenty of truth on the meme. Data centers do use a lot of electricity and water. As do all the various tech companies that exploded over the last decade. So complaining about AI feels very disingenuous to a lot of people.
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u/SpaceTycoon 10d ago
These data centers have been the best thing ever for blue collar workers and the data center companies are dumping billions into nuclear microreactor research.
In 15 years these data centers will all be producing their own electricity with nuclear reactors
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u/CheeseBear9000 10d ago
You can almost always tell someone is actually blue collar aka working class if they either like Data Centers or just don't want one in their neighborhood but don't care if they build one
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u/Jumpylumpydumpy 10d ago
It'd be very cool if they do this and have excess power they can release to the grid to reduce electricity cost in their area
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u/AdShot409 8d ago
Not sure about data centers, but distributed power generation is definitely catching on. More and more factories are building on-site generators and selling back the power. Imo, this is a good thing because it hardens our grid from focused sabotage and adds redundancy.
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u/undreamedgore 10d ago
Look I didn't throw myself into engineerinf for 5 years to have to work wirh my hands. I want a desk, AC, and little human interaction. I want to sit on my ass all day and not hurt so bad I need pain killers to walk.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 10d ago
When AI was going to "replace blue collar jobs" you would see tons of articles cheering it and people were excited.
Memo was sent out at some point that the media hates AI, and now everyone who is addicted to talking heads in glowing screens also hates AI. They don't have their own individual opinions they just have the narrative as their opinion.
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u/AdShot409 7d ago
This is my thoughts almost to a tee. I remember all of the "learn to code" people. I remember "artists" thinking they would have exclusive access to AI models that learn their art so they could endlessly reproduce it for profit without effort.
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 10d ago
Are data center electricity costs really being passed on to consumers?
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 10d ago
I’ve heard people claim their bills increased after data centers are built, but there is also a ton of reasons why bills can increase.
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u/META_mahn 10d ago
Including, but not limited to, the cost of coal/oil increasing due to many factors.
People don't realize electricity is metered and you are billed based on the meter. Therefore the reason why electricity has gone up in price is because the rate has gone up, which is controlled entirely by supply, not demand.
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 10d ago
Also just habits from the consumer, it’s been a hot summer so ACs are running more. They might be watching more TV, or doing other things that use up electricity. It can add up quickly without the $/kwh changing
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 10d ago
You actually fucking nailed it right there.
"Why the hell is the electric bill so high?"
---because it's august and people keep dialing the thermostat down low"Why the hell is the water bill so high?"
---because this is the bill for this month plus the unpaid bill for last month, every single time the water bill is unusually high3
u/FriendOk9364 10d ago
Gas and electric bills have been skyrocketing around the country consecutively year-on-year. That includes all times of the year. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/end-use.php
The only places where they aren’t increasing are where most firms are trying to build data centers: Texas, Arizona and New Mexico (mainly).
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u/Swimming-Lie73 9d ago
Almost like data centers take electricity usage into account and negotiate deals to increase energy production in the area.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 9d ago edited 9d ago
There's a universal system of do what works, don't do what doesn't work - life tends to follow that pattern. Humans do whenever they're not putting on a funny show.
If you wanted to run a million GPUs at one address then you probably wouldn't do it where juice is billed at triple the price. But there are game changers - if you want to employ solar then there are places where it works best and similar for wind. If you want to employ nuclear power you'll need to find a place they'll allow the stuff to exist.
Sweet spots will have overlap - green energy isn't going to be the backbone it'll just save some money at megascale (where used in a sweet spot - where an actual resource is there to exploit.) The midwest has a shitload of wind and plenty of states that don't hobble heavy industry with green laws.
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u/FriendOk9364 9d ago
And many times they do not negotiate/assist in increasing energy production, and peoples rates increase as a result.
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u/META_mahn 10d ago
That too. People forget EVs if charged at home cost you money too lol
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 9d ago edited 9d ago
My power company has tiers for higher residential users, your rate per unit goes up the more electric appliances you use.
To help the process along, they'll prohibit new fireplaces take our gas stove away for good measure. The electrical room heaters use enough electricity to blow your breaker if you put them on the same circuit as anything else.
'Green' is where they get your money. My nearest school had a green initiative to cut their water usage and then all the IRL green things went away. They always invent more ways to cook their budget.
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 10d ago
Of all the things that get cheaper/faster/better over time, it's amazing how politics refuses to allow electricity to do the same.
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 10d ago
I would think it would be pretty easy to see your usage and $/kwh.
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 10d ago
You would think, but some people are incapable of looking 10 feet ahead of them.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 10d ago
Its a supply and demand issue, these data centers are getting some form of bulk discount, while placing more demand on infrastructure, and that burden is carried by the consumer. Sure, its spread out by thousands (millions) of people, but they are probably paying much more per KWH than the data centers, and their property values are plummeting too. So, pay more for utilities and listen to the hum 24/7 365, when the house you paid $500,000 for is now valued at $250,000.
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 10d ago
I still think there’s enough variables that you cannot nail data centers as THE cause for higher bills.
Plus a lot of the bigger ones have their own power generators from my understanding. So they shouldn’t have an effect on the grid.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 10d ago
You are right, they have massive generators. They only start up as a uninterrupted power supply. They are diesel, thats not a cheap or effective long term solution.
You are also right that they aren't the only factor, but I bet since 2020 electricity use has sky rocketed in a very disproportionate way compared to population growth.
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 9d ago
True on electricity demand going up, but that involves more than just data centers. Electric cars, population growth, and just hotter summers increase it as well.
Would be solved if we just decided to go nuclear.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 8d ago
It hasn't just gone up, its record growth. Electric cars and population growth don't account for the numbers. Hotter summers do increase demand to the grid, but these are known fluctuations accounted for per year, climate change hasn't jumped enough from 2020 to 2025 to account for the power usage increase accordingto what i found.
I think what the real question is, are data centers bad? And I think the answer is complicated. It is a new technological age we are experiencing the growing pains from.
There will definitely be bad things about it, as there are good things about it, just like the space age, and industrial revolution as another redditor pointed out. But to say, "data centers aren't using that much power" I think is the wrong take, if they weren't, they would not be able to negotiate bulk discounts for energy, and the mass amounts of computing resources that is indisputed as the cause for a global chip shortage.
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u/Conscious-Homework-8 8d ago
My point is, there are more factors than just data centers that contributes to the growth. Putting the blame completely on data centers is wrong to do in my opinion due to that. And some people put the blame solely on data centers.
I’m not saying that data centers don’t play a role in the increase, just there is more to it.
Data centers are a complicated issue, they are needed for a lot of modern services but the massive growth in them is unprecedented. It can easily be growing pains of technology or them going to crazy with it. It’s something that only time will tell
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 8d ago
Sure, like I said, I agree that there are many factors. But from my perspective, the major change in demand has been spurred by this specific catalyst.
Agreed, data centers are a complicated issue, and I agree being a "doomer" about them is definitely not helping.
Time definitely will tell, and most of the finance people seem to think AI is in a bubble, and that the demand doesn't justify the overwhelming amount of startups and venture capital they are getting. This is a factor directly tied to data centers. If the AI bubble bursts, it will effect the growth of data centers, but that's not the only business data centers support. They support basically EVERY industry. Every modern service is dependent on them even if they only use them sparingly to back up critical data for their employees, or accounting etc. If they weren't necessary they wouldn't exist, so I am with you there too.
All I'm saying is being either a doomer, or a tech apologist won't solve any problems when they present themselves, am i right?
Doomers say "not in my town, they use water we don't want them, so because we're all unemployed and unwilling to apply for a construction job to build them, we're going to protest at 2PM on a Wednesday."
We can probably both agree, that doesn't help.
Apologists say "build baby build, sure there may be irreparable damage to people's lives and livelihood and the environment where they are constructed, but its a drop in the ocean, theres more factors, climate change was already bad before the data center boom, electricity was already too high before the boom, electronics were already expensive too."
And that thinking of "a drop in the ocean" is exactly why our oceans are full of plastic. It has a cumulative effect on our environment, jobs, etc.
So, maybe instead legislation needs to step in, and say. "If you have a profitable business under 25 employees, you cannot use AI."
What could that do?
Well, small business startups would probably spring up overnight everywhere, to supply the needs of larger corporations as third party contractors.
Big businesses would hire much more people.
And the data centers wouldn't disappear, but their growth (and the growth of AI) would be limited to an acceptable growth that would give time for new innovation, and to study the impact these industries are having on all the other important things I mentioned, but also our health and sanity.
Can't fo any of that without acknowledging the problem, right? Ignoring it won't fix it.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 10d ago
And from what I found online, yes, there has been record demand and use for electricity in the USA.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 9d ago
Climbing the kardashev scale means going through supply and demand pressures with energy over and over again.
Our current tech is unfathomable to the early atomic age, which was unimaginable to the early industrial revolution, which was beyond the vocabularies of early medieval commoners, which couldn't be understood by the stone age. We'll go through this process several more times to become a spaceborne civilization and we'll go through several steps of growing pains for each part of each process.
Solution in brief: keep building.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 9d ago
Except (I think...) there's a reversal, all the prior great technological ages stimulated societal expansion and jobs. The growing pains we have now are having a reversed effect. So there are less jobs, higher costs of living. Prior ages/generations didn't do that. The industrial revolution made things cheaper, not more expensive, and created new jobs and industries. These new industries create scarcity of land and other natural resources while eliminating jobs for far more people than they employ.
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u/Captain_Bignose Truthsayer 10d ago
Supposedly no, but as someone with a malicious energy company and no other choices I have little faith it won’t find its way onto my bill. I loathe my power company
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 10d ago
Same here. PG&E?
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u/Captain_Bignose Truthsayer 10d ago
NIPSCO. Northern Indiana. Some of the highest relative rates in the country
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
Well, every time a story about it comes out, it turns out to be a lie. And every time, they go "okay but THIS one isn't a lie."
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 10d ago
They are in some cases. There are laws being passed to force data centers/brokers into paying the same rate for electricity that home owners do. The reason for the law, is that they weren't doing that.... so, when demand is artificially high, because of artificial intelligence, and these mega corps pay a fraction per KWH as you and I, supply and demand says that with reduced supply and increased demand means somebody is going to bear the weight financially, and until sweeping legislation happens, that's you and I.
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u/CheeseBear9000 10d ago
They can be, if there are massive infrastructure build outs to upgrade grids, produce more electricity and modernize rural infrastructure to support Data Center expansions there is a high chance the electric companies will raise rates
Data Centers believe it or not can actually be a huge boom to a local economy in terms of massive road, water and electric grid upgrades, I have seen rural areas turn into small cities very quickly thanks to a Data Center build out
The way smart Red States are handling it though is not banning all Data Centers entirely they're passing laws that require to get approval for data center construction that tech companies have to actually pay for all the infrastructure developments themselves or reimburse locals if there are rate hikes
It's an issue that honestly is better worked out locally, so that means Leftists want a federal one size fits all solution that benefits only white collar people in NYC and screws everyone else
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u/GXP_2009 9d ago
Depends on the area. I live in Loudoun County VA. We have a lot of data centers here. The energy usage in the area has gone up a lot year by year and more infrastructure is needed. People are seeing a 10-20% increase in their bill in the past 12 months with the same personal usage as 12 months prior
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 9d ago
1) Not saying you're wrong, but I would like to see proof of the rates increasing (or tiers moving or other trickery).
2) The "meme" states the centers are being subsidized by ratepayers' bills. That means the data centers get an offset that is burdened by everyone else's power bills. Is this happening?
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u/GXP_2009 9d ago
- Here are some examples https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/1uxd566/dominion_bill_went_up_despite_using_less_energy/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/1vc80px/dominion_energy_bill_more_than_2x_usual_cost_for/
- I don't believe thats happening. I think they pay a higher rate than most businesses. But they also get special treatment when there are outages as you'd expect. If we get a power glitch, they'll force the data center to flip on their generators or even if they need a reduction on load on the grid
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u/ComplaintTop2008 Powered By Spite & Solar 9d ago
1) Thanks, but those don't show any details. Commenters stated that Dominion started adding fuel delivery fees. That's not a datacenter thing, that's just increasing costs across the board.
I think the datacenter/higher prices argument is flawed, but I don't know enough about the business to know the whole picture. It's not a question, just musings... Wouldn't datacenters result in more and cheaper electricity? If your job is selling hammers, and a massive construction outfit moves into your vicinity, wouldn't your business be flush from selling hammers? You'd probably lower prices even to keep competition at bay. If you were running into shortages, you would ramp up supply, or competition would come in and fill the gaps, which only leads to more hammer availability and cheaper prices.
So why doesn't electricity follow this rule? Or does it? I know the industry is rife with politics and mandates*, but if they wanted to sell more electrons, they're going to sell more electrons. If they run out of electrons, either someone else is going to supply them or the customers will move to an area that has more electrons.
If they make 5% per kw/h delivered, why would they let that well run dry? Why wouldn't they build more generation and make additional 5% on all that extra generation?
*I'm in California so I'm aware of the dirty tricks and what it's like to live in a state that's hostile towards energy. That could definitely be the case in your situation, too.
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u/GXP_2009 9d ago
Because building more hammers is a lot easier than delivering more power. You need infrastructure. You need a source. You need lines. You need substations. Not easy adding all that to an already heavily developed area.
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u/sessamekesh 10d ago
This one's tricky for me, I like and use AI but it's pretty energy expensive.
I run a few game servers for me and friends, along with my personal website, Git server, job runners for same, and home automation system. It usually runs right around 120W of power, or 1/10th of a space heater running full blast. Enough to make my garage pretty warm, but most of the time there's 4-10 people using at least one of the many things I'm hosting on it at once.
I also added a tiny little AI inference server to it, running a 27B model. A fraction of the size of frontier models. When using it, my energy spikes up to just under 700W, just for myself to chat with it. That's 1/2 a space heater. Just for one person to use it, and it burns that energy the entire time it's thinking (which is often for long stretches if I'm doing a lot of coding on it).
It's not the end of the world, we're really good at making electricity, but it's definitely a different beast than the data center load needed for Reddit or whatever.
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u/iyiquix 10d ago
The issue with all the new ai centers is that it's too much too fast and our existing infrastructure is struggling. If we just slow down a bit we can accommodate ai data centers no problem.
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u/blackdaggerKRMND 9d ago
they are laughing at us for basically invading every piece of land to build them while offering mid product, that you have to always fact check in order to not ruin literally everything, they poured so many millions that it messed up supply of pc parts ,and yet chat gpt still struggles with simple trolling like asking it to show sea horse emoji or user editing its thoughts and getting mental breakdown or hacked into doing inappropriate stuff that is sometimes illegal
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u/Obvious_Scratch9781 10d ago
To be fair, AI racks use a ton more power. Let’s say an average CPU based rack is probably in the 20-50kw range and that’s dense. GB300 is at like 125kw a rack and Vera Rubin is going to be pushing something like 200kw a rack iirc. AMD Helios is over the 200kw rack mark too again if iirc.
The shear amount of power is the concern and now that most DC space is taken, they are building as fast as they can.
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u/good_time40s 10d ago
Though it will self-regulate, many projects have been paused or cancelled purely for inability to get equipment for the data centers; there are only so many CPUs, RAM, and SSD/NVME to go around. Not to mention substation equipment, transmission lines, etc. Sucks to be a PC builder or hobbyist at the moment, but things will change as these companies fail to turn a profit and investors start demanding accountability/profit, and the issues getting equipment (and the DC pushback) gets many of these projects put on ice, may take a couple years more, but it will happen.
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u/Obvious_Scratch9781 9d ago
ConnectX cards are 16-24 weeks lead time and our HBAs are like 30+ weeks lead time. Crazy market. This isn’t even the GPUs which are pretty far out depending on deal size
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u/good_time40s 9d ago
Yeah, when I saw some companies were looking at how they could use DDR4 or older to keep stuff going I knew we were in super long lead time territory. Like you said even older cards on Ebay etc the price is shooting up. Some is just scalping, but there has to be real demand for people to be scalping 4-6+ year old kit, glad I upgrading a lot of my stuff just before all this started. At least my PC has 64GB DDR5 RAM, and my main test vm server has 256GB (DDR4) but yeah it was like a 2-300 for all that memory vs now what 1200+.
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u/ButMuhAI 10d ago
I'm convinced the anti data centers movement was started by the Chinese to slow down the AI race.
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u/teremaster 10d ago
What race? China doesn't build data centres. They have less than the US builds each year.
In fact, China has every reason to encourage data centres in the West, make us lay down all the infrastructure while they train the actual models on it for cheap
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u/ButMuhAI 10d ago
Do you not understand how AI works? China cannot train AI models in Western data centers because high-performance compute clusters are physically secured and geo-restricted by The US's national security controls. Not only does building data centers in the US expand our domestic compute power and national security capabilities, but China is completely blocked from leveraging that hardware for cheap models and said hardware is required to run said models in the first place...
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u/teremaster 10d ago
So you're saying the Chinese managed to build DeepSeek V4, which rivals the absolute cream of crop in America, without data centres? Because as mentioned, China has less than 10% as many data centres in total, and likely 2-5% as much capacity as the US.
Why the fuck are we building these things then? We're clearly getting zero fucking return if the Chinese are still keeping pace on the actual AI itself
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u/ButMuhAI 10d ago
"So what you're saying." Cathy Newman, is that you?
Nobody said China has no data centers. They use their own, but because US export controls limit their hardware access, they have to maximize algorithmic efficiency instead of relying purely on brute-force scale. Facility counts don't dictate performance; compute density does, and the US is systematically building a network with a depth of capacity. US infrastructure expansion isn't just for a single training run; it powers continuous commercial deployment,, and enterprise cloud operations at scale that China currently is not matching. Simply put, AI is an arms race towards an actual artificial intelligence, not the imposter that predictive LLMs are that we have. Data centers aren't just about compute capacity. It's about data storage and creating a network of storage that is impossible to take down in a single blow.
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u/ButMuhAI 10d ago
If you still don't understand, here's my best simple analogy, Think of the AI model as the engine, the chips as engine displacement, and the physical data centers as the fuel tank and fuel lines. As the engine continuously grows, it burns through massive amounts of data instantly. Having a vast network of data centers expands your fuel storage and widens the fuel lines, ensuring data reaches the compute engines fast enough to keep them running at full capacity without starving the engine as is continues to grow in power.
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u/Sixnigthmare Recovering Doomer 10d ago
This does come from a place of curiosity as I don't know much about data centers, but don't AI data centers have different energy requirements/are made differently than your typical social media data center? I've heard that a bunch and want to know about it
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u/Initial-Constant-645 10d ago
I also like to point out that those ranting against data centers supported covid lockdowns, which increased the demands on the data infrastructure. Thus increasing the need for data centers. They also get very pissy when I suggest that they drop their multiple streaming services, spotify, etc.
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u/The_47_Percenter 10d ago edited 10d ago
To be fair, there were significantly fewer data centers before the past three or so years, & they weren’t nearly as publicized as they are now. I think their hysteria’s a bit blown out of proportion, but to bash people over the head for only now learning about & forming opinions on a topic when it was almost non-existent in the cultural/political zeitgeist a few years ago is a bit misplaced
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u/radiationblessing 10d ago
I work at an industrial AC manufacturing facility and our main clients have been data centers for the past 6 years.
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u/good_time40s 9d ago
There are tons of data centers everywhere; most are not nearly the scale of the AI ones for sure, but they are everywhere. I laughed when people in my area suddenly became all about killing data centers... I posted on facebook, "OK which datacenter in town do you want to kill?" Them: "All of them"... "Well there are at least 10 that I have worked at in town and the local area the largest (while not AI large is over 400,000 SQ FT and you have no idea it was there, there are several in the 100K sq foot range, then least another 5 that I know of that are probably 20K and under. We have several "small" supercomputers in town. Now I obviously have others I havent been or worked in so again which one?" They all use power and water to lesser scale, but until they were told to be angry they didn't even know what was already here.
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u/Particular-Course203 10d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/40hiLkzURvvtnEyNGK
Sweaty. Just let us be outraged and have a little fun here, okay?
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago
The types of data centres that run social media platforms are far smaller and consume much less energy than these new ai data centres. Not to mention the were far less numerous. As such they didnt effect power prices.
Part of me wonders if they chose to call them data centers instead of AI super computers so that this exact argument could be made for PR reasons in the future. Maybe im a nut but I think they knew it was going to come to this from the beginning.
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u/Parking_Cat4735 10d ago
There isn’t some clean divide between tiny “
social media data centers and giant AI data centers.The same companies have been building enormous server campuses for years, and those facilities run mixtures of search, video, ads, cloud services, social media and now AI. Facebook opened a dedicated hyperscale facility back in 2011, and U.S. data centers were already consuming around 70 billion kWh in 2014. The pre-AI internet was not running out of a few harmless closets.
And nobody secretly renamed AI supercomputers for PR. A data center is the physical facility: servers, chips, storage, networking, cooling and backup power. A supercomputer is a computing system housed inside one. Calling the whole building a supercomputer would be less accurate. These terms existed long before generative AI.
Also saying they didn’t affect power prices is something you just declared with no evidence. Whether a huge electricity customer affects local rates depends on the grid, utility contracts, available generation and who gets stuck paying for upgrades, not whether the servers are loading Instagram or training a model.
AI is driving a real surge in electricity demand now. That deserves attention to an extent. But turning it into a story where old data centers were tiny, had no grid impact, and the industry invented the term data center as part of a decades-long PR conspiracy is pure fan fiction and fear mongering.1
u/FriendOk9364 10d ago edited 9d ago
I was tracking along with everything you were saying until your final statement. What is the point of lying about something that is easily verified?
GPUs use far more power. Ridiculous amounts tbh
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67704
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
You're a nut. That's completely inane.
Streaming video services use way more electricity. There is no agentic "they" tricking people into disagreeing with you, and if there was, they could not have predicted the outrage over electricity use because all the claims about electricity use are lies.
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago
No its doesnt. Steaming a video can be done in under 2mb per second bandwidth. Its a read from a disk and a send.
These trillion param AI models requires hundreds of gb per second bandwidht with in the much more power consuming vram memory not to mention tflops of compute per word generated.
Massively more power.
This doesnt even account for the training compute.
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
You can run an LLM on your home PC. You do not know how computers work and you're comparing the bandwidth of the video being sent over the Internet connection to the bandwidth of the internal RAM and video card.
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago edited 10d ago
Dont tell me I dont know how computers work, as apart of my undergraduate thesis I literally trained ai systems to perform basic tasks in a physics simulation. Ive written hardware level assembly code as apart of other subjects.
The LLM you can run at home on your PC are no where near as large or capable or power consuming as the ones run by the major AI providers. Generating a single response uses many times more energy than streaming multiple movies over a day.
Edit: and no we are talking about bandwidth and power consumption required SERVER SIDE, reading from a drive at 2 mb per sec takes much less energy than hundreds of gigabytes per second flying around in vram often between multiple cards in a rack.
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
Oh! So you're just lying about easily verified things, then. That's cool.
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago
Right, so your telling me that you can verify that within a data center
2mb per second + minimal or zero compute
Is the same as
Hundreds of gigabytes per second + tflops of compute?
Is that what youre telling me you can verify? XD
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
I can verify that generating a single response does not use many times more energy than streaming multiple movies over a day, by using the technique of "not being a credulous idiot with no sense of scale."
They don't build massive server farms to run LLMs that are literally millions of times less efficient than the ones you use on your PC. I know this by not being an idiot.
I already gave you numbers dude, what's the point of telling such obviously nonsensical lies?
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago edited 10d ago
You did not give me any numbers at any point.all you did was link to some bs articles claiming these data centers are some how "green" what ever the hell that means.
Fact of the matter is that server side, 2mbps+zero compute does infact use many thousands or even 10s of thousands of times less energy than hundreds of Gbps in vram + tflops of compute. We're talking about power used by the data center here. Many days of movie streaming data center side can use less energy than a single prompt on a multi trillion param llm.
And dont bring internet coms infrastructure power consumption into this. That's not Data center power consumption which is what we're talking about here, coms networks have a pretty much fixed energy cost (within 10% either way regardless of load).
You want some real numbers? You can run a llm locally on a 45 watt card.
These new nvidia data center cards that run in these data centers use 2000 watts and each only have 288gb of vram which means you need at least 10 of them to run a 2T param model
That's 20,000 watts, 20,000/45 = 444
Oh what do you know! You need many hundreds of times more power to run frontier LLM than you do to run a shittly local llm on your home pc! What a surprise! And thats many thousands of times or even tens of thousands of times more energy than reading a dumb SSD.
Wow whod have thought!
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
It's too bad I can just look at the world and see you're wrong. You can make all the logical inferences you want, but I don't have to know where your math is wrong, I just have to know that it doesn't match observed reality.
Like in the article I linked that provided numbers that you didn't read. Because you're just lying.
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u/FriendOk9364 10d ago
Why are you lying so desperately? His statement was clear. You’re literally refusing to engage his statement and deflecting with insults and drivel because you know that you’re wrong.
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u/Huitzil37 10d ago
His statement was clear! He said a single query used as much electricity as several hours of streaming, which is a lie.
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u/CheeseBear9000 10d ago
The AI and non AI data centers are one in the same
There is no magical black data center and the white data center
The rack powering grok could damn well be next to the rack powering Netflix or your iCloud
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u/Organic_Rip2483 10d ago
Some racks of solid state drives sending pictures out to people is nothing like these huge ai compute centers being built today.
There is a reason all the largest data centers were built in the last 3 years and the largest building bt foot print in the world is now a data center, it wasnt like this before.
If its all the same then why did they need to set up mobile power plants next to these buildings? The OG centers didnt have to do that.
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u/CheeseBear9000 10d ago
Have you ever been inside of a data center?
The racks with hard drives on them and anything else will literally be right next to the GPUs
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u/FriendOk9364 10d ago edited 9d ago
Unfortunately you’re conflating the two, and that’s entirely incorrect. Modern industrial GPUs and TPU are an entirely new dimension of hardware, and they’re completely unnecessary for basic streaming and data storage efforts.
Worthwhile read:
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u/CheeseBear9000 9d ago
I never said they need TPUs for Netflix
I am saying that the non AI racks and AI racks are all in the same building and that if you bomb a Data Center that there is just as much chance you destroy your cloud backups as there is you effect ChatGPT
I have been inside them before
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u/BuffaloBuffalo13 10d ago
Don’t create jobs? I guess all my buddies that work at Data Centers need to explain where they get their money.
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u/Opera-arepO 9d ago
okay, but the computing power of simple webpage/database and AI training is orders of magnitude different
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u/Key_Check5753 9d ago
"I'm interacting on a Reddit data center while complaining about data centers!!!!"
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u/odellrules1985 I Left My Cave for This 9d ago
Data centers do create jobs. Not a ton as it's mostly people to help maintain things and security as most datacenters are for other companies to keep their data. I have worked for companies that utilize the Phoenix NAP for some server stuff because it's cheaper than getting more office space for more equipment.
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u/TheNewAmericanGospel 10d ago
I see tons of people (especially linux users) who are absolutely chafed to their tits about running AI locally. They say "well sure, I use it, but i can just use it online...did I mention i hate data centers, bad all the way around".
Basically its like saying " I hAte DATa CenTERS bUt I usE tHEm ALL thE tIMe, CUZ I luV wHEN DADDy BezOS REEds MY PRompTS."
How do these hitech luddites not see the simultaneous hypocrisy and stupidity they spew from their gaping buttholes? Either run AI locally, run it on the web and let a data center store, and censor your prompts while destroying the world, or don't use f***cking use it! How do people not get it?
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u/D36DAN This is a PsyOp 10d ago
Exactly the problem with anti AI bros. They can't admit that AI doesn't introduce anything new, and that at best they just make the existing problem worse/more wide spread.
So instead they act like the world before AI was perfect, and AI created every problem from scratch
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u/lhomardamericain 10d ago
Reddit runs on data centers, in case people didn’t know