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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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[–] 6 points 2 months ago (9 children)

Usable quantum computing will annihilate the need for these data centres. They'll be defunct within a decade. The earth will be worse off and the money laundering that they provide will move elsewhere. Fuck this timeline.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    Sorry to burst your bubble but DC’s aren’t going anywhere. Even if we are in a position to make quantum computers commercially available in the next 10 years they’ll still need to be housed somewhere, powered, cooled and connected.

    Besides, quantum computers are great at complex calculations and simulations but you wouldn’t use them to host a website or a VPS. They’ll be hideously expensive so will only be used for the specific workloads that they excel at and everything else will done with the same servers we have now.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don't require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Neural nets and LLMs are not doing complex math, they're doing very large amounts of simple math. Quantum computing is probably not going to accelerate our current NN tech.

    This is why GPUs are excellent for AI applications, they are built around the goal of doing large amount of pixel shader computations, which is pretty simple math. You could do the math to shade a pixel by hand, for example.

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

    Fair enough, I didn’t realise they were so different from traditional DC’s.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    They're not servers. It's just gpus. It's not really a data center, basically the same as bitcoin mining.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    They're still servers, the focus is on the GPU side though. A single DGX B300 has 8 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 2 Xeon 6776P CPUs. And networking, RAM, storage. Consumes 14 kilowatts and looks like this

    You COULD host a website on one if you wanted to. You'd be stupid to do it, but you could.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    They shouldn't be. One of the issue the sheer size and volume, they're being built based only on speculation not actual need (all the ssd/ram/gpu are sitting in warehouses waiting for these DC to be built — if they're fabricated at all). They're also being built where it's cheap, not where they would be needed (industrial and urban areas) just to save money, externalize costs, and avoid regulations.

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