Meta is building several gigawatt-sized data centers to power AI, as reported by Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" to accomplish this feat, with an aim of creating "superintelligence." The term typically refers to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence across multiple domains. This is something of a holy grail for Silicon Valley tech types.
The first center is called Prometheus and it comes online next year. It's being built in Ohio. Next up, there's a data center called Hyperion that's almost the size of Manhattan. This one should "be able to scale up to 5GW over several years." Some of these campuses will be among the largest in the world, as most data centers can only generate hundreds of megawatts of capacity.
Meta has also been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind and others. Scale AI's co-founder Alexandr Wang is heading up this effort.
However, these giant data centers do not exist in a vacuum. The complexes typically brush up against local communities. The centers are not only power hogs, but also water hogs. The New York Times just published a report on how Meta data centers impact local water supplies.
There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.
Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. The new centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times. Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
This same worrying story is playing out across the country. Data center hot spots in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are also taxing local water reserves. For instance, some Phoenix homebuilders have been forced to pause new constructions due to droughts exacerbated by these data centers.
They don't care if they kill us all. They're desperate to replace workers, the one threat to their power and resolve the contradiction forever in their favor by moving to some imagined new system. In the end they'll likely rip each other off but not before killing off a huge number of us. This sucks. And I have little hope Americans will correctly identify the enemy soon enough to matter before tens of millions die. They'll probably find a release valve by ramping up the imperialism again which is why they're seizing control of the internet and pumping it full of reactionary content, they plan to make today's kids into tomorrow's soldiers lured by the promise of unlimited water if you fight to conquer Africa or Latin America with the US military. Seeing how easy it is for them to get recruits for their ICE stormtroopers from an atomized culture like ours, it'll be so much easier to direct that violence outwards again. But not before an inward purge I think.
Another thought I just had. Many of us have assumed they can't really deport all the non-white farm workers because it would collapse agriculture. But what if that doesn't matter? What if that's part of getting rid of excess worker capacity they expect to have all too soon by making food scarce and sucking the wealth of workers even more, along with benefit cuts making unemployment a death sentence and increasing desperation. They may actually think that's a good thing and that the people on benefits, the neuro-diverse especially can be bused and marshaled into the fields eventually after killing off a certain amount and the population will support it continuing once it's in place for fear of another food price and supply shock occurring over ending it.
How are they going to have an economy when no one can afford to live in it? All these companies need customers to survive.
many of their companies have been running on nothing more than hype and investments in the hope of future earnings, without turning a profit, so maybe they think this is gonna keep working
eg, tesla sure as fuck wasnt thriving because of its customers. uber wasnt overvalued as hell because of its customers. twitter didnt sell for billions because it had customers.
I feel like your recent economic enterprise has given you a better insight into the minds of these freaks and their investors than the lay hexbear, as I'm sure you need to think like them to make money off them, no? What do you feel like you learned from that exercise about how these lizards view the future of their own industry?
Hogs love stuffing AI into everything no matter how dumb the application is. Markets are not rational at all and every time I thought it would go one way or another based on news or poor earnings I got hosed.
That's so interesting. So what would you base your moves off of?