Comment on How does the private equity bubble compare to the AI bubble if at all?
scarabic@lemmy.world 2 days agoI acknowledge your point about alternate use, but we also need to look at a datacenter we may or may not need as a “power consumption plant.” These jackasses just keep loading and loading up the grid, looking to make a private dollar on public infrastructure. It’s wasteful and not necessarily a baseline good thing ^TM even if AI goes flop.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Used for AI, I agree that a faraway, loud, energy-hungry data center comes with a huge host of negatives for the locals, to the point that I’m not sure why they keep getting building approval.
But my point is that in an eventual post-bubble puncture world where AI has its market correction, there will be at least some salvage value in a building that already has power and data connections. A loud, energy-hungry data center can be tamed to be quiet and energy-sipping based on what’s hardware it’s filled in. Remove the GPUs and add some plain servers and that’s a run-of-the-mill data center, the likes of which have been neighbors to urbanites for decades.
I suppose I’d rehash my opinion as such: building new data centers can be wasteful, but I think changing out the workload can do a lot to reduce the impacts (aka harm reduction), making it less like reopening a landfill, and more like rededicating a warehouse. If the building is already standing, there’s no point in tearing it down without cause. Worst case, it becomes climate-controlled paper document storage, which is the least impactful use-case I can imagine.