Comment on You 'member? 🟣
Denvil@piefed.world 1 week agoData centers are actually useful for a lot of things, handling traffic to websites, storing records, academic research, and whatnot. There’s a very good chance your medical records are distributed across various data centers.
AI is absolutely not one of those useful things, and is a big driving factor for the rapid expansion of new data centers which are sucking up so many valuable resources for something so useless. Data centers are not bad, AI data centers are bad
Beehaw_Girl@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Thank you. And I would like to know what percentage of data centers are exclusively for ai, because that seems to be what’s upsetting everybody lately, that all the farmland being bought up and people’s houses being taken by eminent domain to make these data centers, all for ai? Or for all the other purposes you stated?
Denvil@piefed.world 1 week ago
A complicated question to answer, I doubt anybody would have a definitively correct answer to it.
The answer is probably both really. It’s not like the internet has just stopped expanding and everything is going into AI now. But AI takes up an unproportional amount of the computational power. A data center can house servers for hundreds of different companies or even individuals, all doing different things with them. An AI data center can be dedicated to one singular company who rents out the entire space for hundreds of servers purely for AI.
Much like it’d be difficult to count every human on earth, there will probably never be a definitive number on how much is dedicated to AI. However, a study by the Electric Power Research Institute in 2024 estimated that between 10-20% of data center power consumption came from AI.
That seems relatively low, until you consider that 10-20% is compared to the 80-90% of power that goes towards literally everything else across the entire internet, and it keeps going up rapidly. For every 8-9 servers used for accounting data, sales records, research, communication networks, streaming services, security systems, medical records, multiplayer game servers, automated factory processes, and everything else in the world that computers handle, there are 1-2 servers dedicated ENTIRELY to JUST AI. And the proportion going to AI just keeps going up.