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The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible (futurism.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 37 points 2 months ago (10 children)

If AI is so wonderful they could afford to put up solar panels to power the data centers.

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  • [+] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US's largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.

    Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Its one of those things right?

    If AI was so great we should be seeing OpenAI and Anthropic investing in high schools and Universities, "the next generation" so to speak. If AI is "so cool" we should be seeing investment in the next generation to use it. But we are not seeing that, OpenAI got $50 billion from Nvidia and all of that went on Nvidia GPUs, none of it went towards the people who will be using it in 20 years!

    You have this thing that a lot of very rich people think is going to be biger than the printing press or the internet and they are not facilitating people to learn it... Their moto seems to be "build it and they will come".

    Think what you want about AI... "It is the best thing since sliced bread" or "it is the Anti Christ". These companies need 10x even 100x uptake to justify this years spending, Alone. Never mind next financial year. These companies need so much more uptake to be profitable to the point where the level of investment from the MAANG companies makes sence that we should be seeing investment in schools and universitiy programs for these tools to be used so that the next generation and the generation after that, wants to use these tools. Amazon used to run hackathons where they would promote their tools over Microsoft or Google because they knew the developers who use their tech will advocate for their tech. We are not aeeing that level of support for AI tools and, to me, that speaks volumes.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    What happens at night?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.

    One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we'll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.

    Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.

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