Oh man, I hate data centers more every day. They’re burning energy and causing disturbances in order to support fucking what? What the fuck are we getting in return?
Storing data on us and replacing human jobs with AI. No matter how many jobs your local leaders have been told data centers will create, they are intended to replace many more.
Slightly more convenient search engines. At least according to most of my IT-illiterate peers. “Just ask ChatGPT” - “Fuck, I can already do that with any other search engine, for 1/10th of the energy”.
Not all data centers are for AI. Practically anything you do on the internet lives or transits through a data center. A very serious answer to your question is simply “the internet”. AI data centers are just bigger and more dense than the ones that have been around for a long time.
Are you sure about that? I haven’t been near one but have a single dell poweredge in my basement and it’s fucking loud without diy noise insulation around it. I can only imagine the noise a full building of these things is making.
Yes I’m sure. I’ve worked in a number of standard compute and colo datacenters for years and I haven’t experienced anything like that even in the parking lot of said datacenters. I’ve taken breaks to quietly read in the lobbies of said buildings.
Since I’m getting downvoted and I’m genouinly curious, could someone explain how AI data centers are worse on a noise level than data centers for other purposes?
I’m not saying they are quiet, I just don’t see which hardware for AI is so different from non-ai that it makes a big difference in noise production.
Traditional datacenters usually came in one of two general forms, Colocation datacenters where anyone can rent rack space in the building, and your hyperscaler datacenters like AWS and Azure.
Colocation Datacenters are usually only partially full of servers at any given time, and are often rented by private enterprises running small time web applications or even just internal tools.
The hyperscalers are worse, but the business model is overbuilding capacity but not all the compute is actually being used at any given time. Workloads are variable usually.
It’s not that these datacenters can’t be loud, but rather that due to their lower power usage (compared to AI or Crypto before that) they don’t usually have to be.
The problem with AI datacenters is that they are designed to maximize their capacity and run full throttle 24/7 365. These facilities are bigger, are completely full to the brim with servers, and those servers are all working very hard nonstop. The thing about computers is, the stronger they are and the harder you push them, the more power they require to run. When electronic devices of any kind use more power, they generate more heat. Too much heat will also kill these electronic devices, so they need more cooling. Cooling apparatus makes noise, and the more you have of it, the louder it gets.
The TL;DR of it all is that AI datacenters are designed to maximize their compute capacity, which maximizes their power consumption, which maximizes the heat they generate, so you maximize the cooling, which maximizes the noise.
There’s a separate issue back the the “Consumes more power” step where some datacenters can’t be sated by the local power infrastructure so they have to find ways to supplement the power they get from the grid with additional noisy things like gas generators and such.
I do not like the recent use of the word “compute” as a noun, it’s such incredibly obnoxious boardroom bullshit speak. Compute is a verb. Otherwise great comment that explains the situation pretty well.
Over the internet? Cloud computing, like it always has, or just use the word computing, or processing power, or any of a dozen different phrases we already use for it. Every time someone uses the word compute as a noun a techbro jacks off onto their earnings report.
Turbine generators onsite to manage power spikes and reduce the company’s cost of buying power, in musk’s megadatacenter case, the cunt didnt even get permission, he just ordered it done, and the community suffers.
Yes, but until AI, there weren’t nearly as many data centers and they were much smaller. Now massive data centers are going up all over the country, and no, hosting the internet is not their primary purpose
Oh man, I hate data centers more every day. They’re burning energy and causing disturbances in order to support fucking what? What the fuck are we getting in return?
AI propaganda, AI surveillance.
A third yacht for a billionaire
More surveillance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Data centers are acoustic weapons
Shrimp Jesus memes and scams able to dupe even more old people
Storing data on us and replacing human jobs with AI. No matter how many jobs your local leaders have been told data centers will create, they are intended to replace many more.
Slightly more convenient search engines. At least according to most of my IT-illiterate peers. “Just ask ChatGPT” - “Fuck, I can already do that with any other search engine, for 1/10th of the energy”.
People never see the cost if they don’t pay it.
Not all data centers are for AI. Practically anything you do on the internet lives or transits through a data center. A very serious answer to your question is simply “the internet”. AI data centers are just bigger and more dense than the ones that have been around for a long time.
Currently, AI accounts for 20% of data center power usage. By 2030 it’s projected to be 50%.
Regular non-ai datacenters don’t have all this noise
(At least according to this comment) this is a normal data center.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/26779485
This isn’t an “AI” data center specifically.
Are you sure about that? I haven’t been near one but have a single dell poweredge in my basement and it’s fucking loud without diy noise insulation around it. I can only imagine the noise a full building of these things is making.
Yes I’m sure. I’ve worked in a number of standard compute and colo datacenters for years and I haven’t experienced anything like that even in the parking lot of said datacenters. I’ve taken breaks to quietly read in the lobbies of said buildings.
Since I’m getting downvoted and I’m genouinly curious, could someone explain how AI data centers are worse on a noise level than data centers for other purposes?
I’m not saying they are quiet, I just don’t see which hardware for AI is so different from non-ai that it makes a big difference in noise production.
Traditional datacenters usually came in one of two general forms, Colocation datacenters where anyone can rent rack space in the building, and your hyperscaler datacenters like AWS and Azure.
Colocation Datacenters are usually only partially full of servers at any given time, and are often rented by private enterprises running small time web applications or even just internal tools.
The hyperscalers are worse, but the business model is overbuilding capacity but not all the compute is actually being used at any given time. Workloads are variable usually.
It’s not that these datacenters can’t be loud, but rather that due to their lower power usage (compared to AI or Crypto before that) they don’t usually have to be.
The problem with AI datacenters is that they are designed to maximize their capacity and run full throttle 24/7 365. These facilities are bigger, are completely full to the brim with servers, and those servers are all working very hard nonstop. The thing about computers is, the stronger they are and the harder you push them, the more power they require to run. When electronic devices of any kind use more power, they generate more heat. Too much heat will also kill these electronic devices, so they need more cooling. Cooling apparatus makes noise, and the more you have of it, the louder it gets.
The TL;DR of it all is that AI datacenters are designed to maximize their compute capacity, which maximizes their power consumption, which maximizes the heat they generate, so you maximize the cooling, which maximizes the noise.
There’s a separate issue back the the “Consumes more power” step where some datacenters can’t be sated by the local power infrastructure so they have to find ways to supplement the power they get from the grid with additional noisy things like gas generators and such.
I do not like the recent use of the word “compute” as a noun, it’s such incredibly obnoxious boardroom bullshit speak. Compute is a verb. Otherwise great comment that explains the situation pretty well.
Ok.
Which noun would you prefer for the overarching generalized concept of computation sold as a product?
Over the internet? Cloud computing, like it always has, or just use the word computing, or processing power, or any of a dozen different phrases we already use for it. Every time someone uses the word compute as a noun a techbro jacks off onto their earnings report.
Turbine generators onsite to manage power spikes and reduce the company’s cost of buying power, in musk’s megadatacenter case, the cunt didnt even get permission, he just ordered it done, and the community suffers.
But the reason most new datacenters are build is AI. AI is the cause that the number of datacenters are spiking, not any other poor excuse.
Yes, but until AI, there weren’t nearly as many data centers and they were much smaller. Now massive data centers are going up all over the country, and no, hosting the internet is not their primary purpose