@dee The water argument drive me nuts as well, like yes you might not want to build such a cooling system in Arizona, but when it's a race between (in a lot of situations) "consume a decent multiplier more power" or "add some water to the water cycle"... bleh. people.

I suppose a lot of this is just the increase in general skepticism in society on everything (certainly in the US), people are generally not cartoon villains and do things because they kind of make wider sense

Maybe it always ends up being this way when you understand the subject matter in a better detail, but the data center "debate" has for me obliterated a huge amount of credibility in quite a few people for making crappy and/or mostly uninformed arguments.

Certainly least in the UK it seems to have imported quite a lot of the American backlash (which reading into it seems to have some genuine merits, the developers of those projects are actually seemingly being bastards), but the UK isn't really the one ending up with those ""gigawatt"" data center projects.

It's my understanding that if the data centers were better located geographically it would probably be quite a nice idea to do a lot of AI training in the UK, we end up curtailing quite a lot of wind power anyway due to transmission capacity shortcomings so there's a lot of energy on the table that just literally cannot be used, it's not like the training isn't going to happen at this point instead it just happens in US/Malaysia where they burn a lot of coal and gas to make it happen instead

@nemobis I think the argument the you're going for here is probably separate to the one that I am making.

I am running on the assumption that the demand (for capacity) is there (at least the AI people are building it) and will probably happen wherever it is can be done.

(I do believe that a large amount of the AI build out is silly)

But the hardware/buildings are going to exist regardless, my argument is about where these things a built and run, I would rather have these sites exist in the UK where the power is comparatively clean than Malaysia or many US states.

It's also important to understand the quite a lot of these DC sites have nothing to do with AI, they are just normal carrier/colo sites that either replacing buildings that have reached the end of their life, or yeah, the demand for compute is generally increasing even outside of AI

@kbm0 @nemobis I see your point, but I also strongly believe that the hardware will exist at this point regardless (assuming everyone doesn't go bankrupt in-between the build out and the first day of real operation), as everything is very much ordered out already, hell, this is the core reason why SSDs and RAM are so expensive.

A lot of the AI/LLM workload (especially training) is basically bottlenecked on "Can I get a lot of power as soon as possible and as a bonus reasonably cheaply?", and less so about where it physically is (nothing in these workloads are latency sensitive), Running the LLMs is only lightly location dependent because of contractual data processing agreements.

I don't know the carbon economics of concrete and steel, but I assume UK concrete and steel is about as bad a Malaysian concrete and steel

@kbm0 Yeah I am tired of just lumping entire complex fields into "good or bad?"

@tmcfarlane 100% that example you gave is a local politics failure, In the same way that putting a heavy industry site that close to people is a failure

@tmcfarlane Yeah Harbor Exchange is a bizarre place when you step back and think about it, a demo of the time it was developed in!

@tmcfarlane The water talking point is basically moot, I've had some absolutely insane conversations where people are running under the assumption that the data centers are somehow "destroying" the water permanently somehow.

People are generally also not aware of the absolute comparatively insane water consumption rate that most thermal electricity generation plant has

@russss sure, but even so I guess the UK power grid is far less awful on a kwh/co2 basis than most of the places these sites are being built instead.

Obviously the downside to doing it in the UK is that when the wind is good, power is super clean and cheap, when it's not I assume the viability gets questionable fast

@wolf480pl Right, and also how do you begin to define what is a "good" DC ("We" do like to do things like, email, tiktok, etc) and "bad" DC (AI,LLM)

@ignaloidas @wolf480pl I think the implication is that such a restriction makes the ultra-dense computing that is normally LLM stuff unviable in that form

@penguin42 seawater is famously quite corrosive

@penguin42 yeah I mean some nuclear plants operate this way but also (A) subject to strict environment regulation around maximum discharge heat delta (B) generally copying the nuclear industry is a expensive move