What Is The Data Center Story?

[Hornbein]

I want to know what the data center craze is about. I was able to find only superficial discussions. Can anyone recommend a good online reference? In particular, it seems to me that sooner or later there will be a shakeout and the centers belonging to the losers will go bust. Second, computer hardware goes obsolete so rapidly. Will all those chips doing linear algebra be worthless in three years? And it seems quite likely that more efficient methods will be discovered. That always seems to happen.

 

[Baluncore]

Can anyone recommend a good online reference?

Turn it against itself. Just ask google AI, then follow your nose.

Second, computer hardware goes obsolete so rapidly. Will all those chips doing linear algebra be worthless in three years?

The upgrade of a module in a rack costs less than replacing the entire building. The present hardware modules will be replaced as lower energy, bigger memory, and faster computing become available. Out with the old, in with the new. Market forces will decide the direction of the evolution.

And it seems quite likely that more efficient methods will be discovered. That always seems to happen.

More efficient methods do not always demand a hardware upgrade. Often, existing hardware is used more efficiently.

Above all, connectivity allows a digital task to be sent to where it can be handled most economically. You no longer need to maintain in-house hardware processor capacity, you can hire what you need, when you need it.

 

[jedishrfu]

The rise of data centers is tied closely to the explosion of AI services and cloud computing. AI companies compete for subscribers much like streaming companies compete for viewers, but their product is computational intelligence delivered over the internet.

Modern AI models require enormous computing resources both to train and to serve millions of users in real time. Because most advanced AI systems are too computationally expensive to run locally, companies rely on massive data centers filled with GPUs and specialized hardware.

Cloud companies such as Amazon recognized early that computing itself could be sold as a utility. What began as internal infrastructure for large internet businesses evolved into cloud platforms like AWS, where companies rent storage and computing power on demand.

The competition among AI companies has intensified this trend. Firms pursuing increasingly advanced systems, including possible AGI and ASI successors to today’s models, require huge amounts of computation, electrical power, networking, and cooling infrastructure. As a result, data centers have become critical economic and strategic assets in the modern AI race.

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Who suffers from this expansion?

The rapid expansion of AI and cloud data centers also creates social and environmental costs. Consumers increasingly face subscription-based access to advanced computational tools, which can create pressure to pay for AI services simply to remain competitive in education, business, and creative work.

Large-scale data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water for computation and cooling. In regions where electrical grids are already strained, utilities may expand power generation capacity through natural gas, coal, nuclear, or renewable energy projects depending on local economics and policy.

Critics argue that this expansion can increase environmental stress through higher energy consumption, carbon emissions from fossil-fuel generation, and heavy water usage for cooling systems. Supporters counter that AI and cloud infrastructure can also improve efficiency in science, medicine, engineering, logistics, and energy management.

The debate is therefore not simply about technology itself, but about who benefits, who pays the costs, and how society manages the infrastructure demands of large-scale AI systems.

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The energy market is tiered. When demand is low, consumers pay much less for the bottom tier of hydro and nuclear power. The next tier is wind, and solar at the bottom tier. But because wind and solar are intermittent and demand increases, more costly energy production services come online, such as coal plants and natural gas plants. Higher tiers mean higher prices, which push consumers to buy solar and batteries to offset the higher-tier cost.

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One recent development is the sale of compute nodes to consumers as an alternative to data centers. People could trade space at home for a compute node that draws power from their electrical grid to create a distributed data center. The idea is that it reduces transmission problems and makes the grid more resilient.

The compute node idea follows in the footsteps of the home battery, where you have access to power to charge your EV, and since you'll have leftover energy, it can be pushed back to the grid for additional consumer savings.

We will become islands in a gridded sea, owning our own energy generation (solar), energy storage (battery), and local compute nodes, and sharing it with the community.

 

[FactChecker]

Different companies may have different reasons. It's my understanding that Meta is transferring a lot of its Metaverse resources to AI. That is to put some of their useless Metaverse equipment to a different useless purpose. In my opinion, the resulting AI-generated fake videos will be about as useful to me as the Metaverse was.

 

[jedishrfu]

I think gustaphson’s law applies here as compute capacity increases then the load will follow.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I found this story both interesting and disturbing. Also one has to wonder about the idea of putting extremely sensitive electrical equipment often in dustless environments into a body of salt water?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/using-wave-energy-to-power-sea-based-ai-data-centers/

 

[jedishrfu]

I like how they say free energy but if you're powering a data center I'm pretty sure you're going to be slowing the Earth’s rotation. The effects could be devastating but humanity is good at kicking the can down the road for someone else to worry about it.

There's also water warming from the data center heat that is a much shorter term crisis.

 

[Hornbein]

I like how they say free energy but if you're powering a data center I'm pretty sure you're going to be slowing the Earth’s rotation.

Wave power comes from wind which in turn is from the sun. So it's solar energy and inexhaustible. I dunno how practical it is though.

I can't offhand think of any way to get energy from the Earth's rotation.

 

[Baluncore]

I can't offhand think of any way to get energy from the Earth's rotation.

All tidal hydro systems extract energy from Earth rotation, and so slow the Earth rotation.

 

[Hornbein]

All tidal hydro systems extract energy from Earth rotation, and so slow the Earth rotation.

Reference please.

 

[Baluncore]

All tidal hydro systems extract energy from Earth rotation, and so slow the Earth rotation.

Reference please.

My statement was a general scientific statement, so you need to be much more specific about the part that you do not believe, or wish to challenge, and so require a specific reference. Here are a few top-down articles, so you can better formulate a bottom-up question that would have peer reviewed papers in the literature.

https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2024/06/11/where-do-ocean-tides-get-their-energy-from/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/...surement-of-the-Earth-s-rotation-720-BC-to-AD

Current trends and prospects of tidal energy technology.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7538194/

 

[Hornbein]

My statement was a general scientific statement, so you need to be much more specific about the part that you do not believe, or wish to challenge, and so require a specific reference. Here are a few top-down articles, so you can better formulate a bottom-up question that would have peer reviewed papers in the literature.

https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2024/06/11/where-do-ocean-tides-get-their-energy-from/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/...surement-of-the-Earth-s-rotation-720-BC-to-AD

Current trends and prospects of tidal energy technology.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7538194/

Thank you for your gracious supply of the reference. I was thinking ocean waves, not tides.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

SpaceX's plan: Put all the data centers in space, then profit​

https://finance.yahoo.com/technolog...a-centers-in-space-then-profit-185429840.html

 

[.Scott]

About that discussion on energy from tidal energy systems. There are tidal effects, primarily from our orbiting moon. And there are waves, primarily from meteorology. And, just to avoid any word play, there are tidal waves, from geology.
If you dammed up a section of ocean shore and installed hydroelectric generators on the dam, you could tap energy from the tides. Where I live, the difference between low and high tide is roughly 3 meters.

But will this actually slow the Earth's spin?
I posed this question to Google:
"Will tidal effects eventually lock the earth to face the moon?"
Citing two youtube sources and what appear to be course notes from the University of Rochester, it claimed this might happen in 50 billion years. The article cited only estimated "billions of year".
The reason it said "might" is because the evolution of our Sun might interrupt this process.
Even so, this does not actually answer the question. What your shoreline dam is actually doing is providing the tides with an inelastic collision with the energy converted to electricity. Without that dam, the tide would still have come in and struck the beach. If the beach is elastic, all you have done is directed the available energy to electricity instead of heat. To the extent that the beach is inelastic, some of that tidal power would be reflected back out to sea and eventually converted to heat. So, if your dam provides a more inelastic collision than was there before, and that reflected power somehow diminished the total amount of tidal power absorbed by the Earth, then you could claim that your dam is slowing the Earth's spin.

Getting back to @jedishrfu 's concern about the "devastating effects" of slowing the Earth's spin:
1) It's not certain that tidal energy stations (such as the ones in France and South Korea) actually slow the Earth's spin in comparison to the shoreline they replace.
2) If they do slow it down, it would be a very minor contribution to Earth's conversion of tidal power to heat that occurs along all ocean shoreline, many sea beds, and even to the viscosity of seawater.
3) Although this could be characterized as "kicking this can down the road", it is a very small can and a very long and hazardous road. If in billions of years there are people left to "worry about it", a slower spin may be to their advantage.

 

[WWGD]

SpaceX's plan: Put all the data centers in space, then profit​

https://finance.yahoo.com/technolog...a-centers-in-space-then-profit-185429840.html

Love to see how they send out repair crews when remote fixes won't do.