> It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.
Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.
I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.
We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.
inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.
seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.
if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.
same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.
You just are unreasonable. It's impossible to have this discussion when you deny basic facts like AI positives and bitcoing increasing renewable generation demand the world over.
>if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves.
That is unilaterally illegal or they would have done so along time ago. The people you should be mad at are the ones who don't want to pay for better electricity infrastructure, ie the average person. 90% of people are degrowthers who want to live in europe with the same daily routine until they die. This one of the reasons we have a representative democracy and not a direct one.
Take the PC market for example. PCs have been dead since the iphone, yet people buy them out of habit, there is simply no other reason, if the cost goes up, even slightly (despite decades of falling prices) they will be shocked out of their stasis. Mad, but awake they find something else to do.
The backlash is and always has been incredibly fucking stupid. The same dipshits who want to bring manufacturing back to the US cannot tolerate goddamned data centers when the negative externalities and infastructural strain would be orders of magnitude worse.
If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.
Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.
Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.
If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.
If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.
Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.
>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.
can’t wait for people to complain about how much water or energy bringing manufacturing back to america uses. oh wait, they won’t, cause it’s not AI. people didn’t care about data centres before AI. this is an ideological issue wrapped up with a bow on it by environmental issues. that’s not to say america is absolutely handling it’s energy transition terribly, it is
This is the part that really stood out to me.
> It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.
Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.
I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.
We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.
The Coming ‘Power Wars’ Between Humans and Datacenters
https://sourceryintel.com/reports/humans-vs-datacenters
Seems the humans love the AI chatbots though. But I guess they figure they run on magic, not actual electricity and water.
Some humans do.
inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.
seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.
if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.
same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.
You just are unreasonable. It's impossible to have this discussion when you deny basic facts like AI positives and bitcoing increasing renewable generation demand the world over.
>if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves.
That is unilaterally illegal or they would have done so along time ago. The people you should be mad at are the ones who don't want to pay for better electricity infrastructure, ie the average person. 90% of people are degrowthers who want to live in europe with the same daily routine until they die. This one of the reasons we have a representative democracy and not a direct one.
Take the PC market for example. PCs have been dead since the iphone, yet people buy them out of habit, there is simply no other reason, if the cost goes up, even slightly (despite decades of falling prices) they will be shocked out of their stasis. Mad, but awake they find something else to do.
> degrowthers
lmao im wheezing, AI lovers have definitely reached cryptocurrency-adjacent levels of lmao out here
If you think the parent is being unreasonable, just wait until you see how the general public gets after another couple of years of this.
Your use of the word “degrowther” outs you as a neoliberal shill. And oh look at that. You have <100 karma.
The backlash is and always has been incredibly fucking stupid. The same dipshits who want to bring manufacturing back to the US cannot tolerate goddamned data centers when the negative externalities and infastructural strain would be orders of magnitude worse.
If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.
Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.
Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.
If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.
If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.
Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.
>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.
> The same dipshits
Are they? "Bring manufacturing back to the US" is vaguely right-aligned and ideological AI opposition is vaguely left-aligned in my experience.
can’t wait for people to complain about how much water or energy bringing manufacturing back to america uses. oh wait, they won’t, cause it’s not AI. people didn’t care about data centres before AI. this is an ideological issue wrapped up with a bow on it by environmental issues. that’s not to say america is absolutely handling it’s energy transition terribly, it is