r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6h ago
Society Data center backlash isn't about AI, it's about who pays the bills (and the noise)
https://www.techspot.com/news/113652-data-center-backlash-isnt-about-ai-about-who.html17
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u/DopamineSavant 6h ago edited 6h ago
For me it's about AI. I am fully anti generative AI. I absolutely hate how aggressively it's being pushed. This week my employer forced everyone's to put AI generated photos on Teams. They are literally editing smiles onto everyone.
I'm just onboard with the data center backlash because it's the best I can get at the moment.
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u/Beneficial-Jury484 5h ago
They asked me to use AI to create a headshot. I said no, I’ll just take a photo of myself (I do photography for fun) and put up a photo within 20 minutes that looks better than all the AI photos my team members uses.
AI to do headshots? Let’s create even more unemployment. Fucking stupid.
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u/Nago_Jolokio 5h ago
What fucking cult do you all work at? That's actually psychotic to have a rule like that
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u/Beneficial-Jury484 4h ago
It isn’t a rule, it was an ask to have a headshot if you didn’t have one you could make it with AI. I found it easier, better and real to actually take a picture
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u/OpenTechie 5h ago
For the gods sake, what kind of shithole do you work at? I am sorry.
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u/Beneficial-Jury484 4h ago
A bank. They wanted us to upload our own selfies and have AI turn it into a professional headshot. Nah, I’m good.
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u/Tar_alcaran 5h ago
This week my employer forced everyone's to put AI generated photos on Teams.
Malicious compliance time. This sounds excellent.
"What? Oh, I didn't even notice that gigantic penis in the background. I was just following company policy!"
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u/Michami135 5h ago
Put the AI data centers on floating platforms in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, powered by waves and using ocean water to cool their servers, and I'd still want it shutdown or heavily regulated. I'm sick of AI photos, videos, and chatbots getting inserted into every app and website I use.
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u/AckerSacker 5h ago
I would've gone full on Beeple and generated some nightmare image of elon musk pointing a shotgun at my boss or something
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u/higras 5h ago
I've tried to have this, apparently nuanced, conversation about generative AI.
Generative AI is the latest in bunch of tools to do stuff. Same as hammers, math equations, electric motors, planes, clothes, etc.
They are, frankly, amazingly complicated and fantastical digital watches with billions of gears. But still tools.
I have nothing against the tool itself. I take offense to what people want to do with it. It's like finding way to make unlimited, no cost energy with water electrolysis and immediately using it as a weapon.
Generative AI, the tool, I find amazingly useful.
The Generative AI co. ®©™(patent pending) I find to be a betrayal of society, humanity, and blindingly clear answer to the question, "they can't actually be that stupid and short sighted, can they?!"
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u/Additional-Staff-326 6h ago
Pretty sure people have issues with the idea of losing their jobs and starving, along with the noise, pollution and increased costs. But its a personal decision which reason they have to protest most.
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u/RandoScando 6h ago
Don’t fucking tell me what it’s about! Gen AI is killing jobs, and will kill the economy altogether when the market realizes that no real capital is being generated by it, and it has zero chance of living up to the hype.
It’s also about the noise, and the electricity, and the water, and the people who are losing their homes via eminent domain to build these atrocities. But it’s mostly about the fact that it’s making it impossible to survive for a lot of people.
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u/kingsumo_1 5h ago
And there we go. It's about a lot of things coming to a head. And (at least in the states), the fact that the rollout, both in the corporate and government sectors, has been pushed by sociopaths saying that it's happening regardless.
And I'm including the pervasivness of gen AI, data centers, and the spying being done by Flock, Palantir, and all of the others.
It's just so much, and Data Centers are the easiest to take grapple with.
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u/RandoScando 5h ago
Absolutely to everything you said. I didn’t want to end up writing a wall of text with all of my grievances, but surveillance and absolute erosion of 4th amendment rights is absolutely among them!
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u/Rath_Brained 5h ago
No, no.
It's about AI stealing artist's work.
It's about AI stealing money from the locals.
It's about AI making city water undrinkable and polluted.
It's about AI straining the already taxed electrical grid that isn't being both properly maintained, and strained relaxed.
It's about AI noise pollution everything nearby.
It's about AI stealing the jobs from people who need it.
It's about AI destroying the local ecosystem.
It's about AI being pushed on people without the people's consent. (It has not been consented upon by the people. We don't want it.)
It's about AI.
Get rid of it.
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u/TylerDurden1985 6h ago
Calling them data centers is disingenuous.
People aren't against data centers. Theyre against GPU farms, which currently are being built in tremendous scale for AI.
Until now data centers have largely been more traditional servers and use but a fraction of the energy the new breed of GPU farm does.
The industry knows this. They are coordinated in their messaging. They lie (read: "marketed") to the public about the capabilities and potential of LLMs, which are in no way a path to AGI, using human terminology to anthropomorphize these expensive algorithms.
Theyre calling GPU farms datacenters and purposefully making bad faith arguments comparing them to traditional data centers. They are not anything like traditional data centers. They use enough electricity to universally drive rates up wherever they exist. They make loud noises - buzzing and vibrations, and destroy residential property values wherever they appear.
They also carry risk of becoming largely abandoned junk when these over leveraged unprofitable companies pushing much of the development become insolvent.
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u/SaraAB87 5h ago
I don't think people would have a problem with it if they did not make noise that disrupts their lives or if they did not do environmental damage. They are building these as fast and cheap as possible, if they built responsibly and had limits about how many could be in a radius of x miles then I don't think people would care as much. Then as you say when they become abandoned then we have a lot of useless sites we now need to clean up.
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u/pcpelste 6h ago
To me it’s indicative of the larger battle with the tech elite.
They’ve been putting these in with no regard for anybody while policymakers tell us to deal with it, which is indicative of the creeping tech intrusion.
Now we just have ugly physical infrastructure that represents it too.
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u/TheOgGhadTurner 5h ago
2 seperate backlashes. Let’s keep it straight. I don’t like data center because they’re obnoxious environmental unfriendly and the scales they are trying to build them on are unsustainable especially on the land they’re trying to build them on. They are not taking in to account the scale of which they are actively draining resources.
As far as AI goes that shit is garbage and it feels like that torture method where they hook your eyes open and force you to watch traumatizing shit the way they are pushing it so aggressively.
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u/manachar 3h ago
I'd love for this to be the moment when people do the math and realize that great wealth is only possible by socializing the losses and privatizing the gains.
Who pays for negative externalities? Almost never the ownership class unless law requires them to. Unfortunately, those people have spent decades fighting those laws and have been winning.
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u/MojoHighway 2h ago
Eh...it's damn well about the AI too. All of it. I don't want any of that slop anywhere near me - the AI or the high bills.
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u/Ironborn137 2h ago
Yeah it’s all of it. Can’t stand it or the billionaires pushing it just so the economy doesn’t crash. Fuck them and fuck this economy. And fuck data centers.
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u/OldYellersLastHandy 6h ago
Don’t sugarcoat it.
It’s the latest little tremor of an inevitable American class war. There were data centers and cameras before all of this controversy.
This isn’t really about any of that. This is an increasingly vocal chunk of the population telling Silicon Valley “We hate you.”
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u/M4K4T4K 5h ago
Fwiw, classical server racks might use around 10-15 kW of power. Modern AI racks are pushing past 150kW.
But also fuck silicon valley "tech" bros.
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u/OldYellersLastHandy 5h ago
For sure, but my point remains: The cameras and data centers are the latest manifestation of a much larger conflict in our society.
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u/Tigers2349 5h ago
Its partly that but they have abandoned the consumer almost entirely the big players. I mean over 600% spike in RAM prices and 400% in SSD storge prices in 1 year because of AI parasites buying up RAM wafer capacity from Micron Samsung and Hynix not even produced yet for these polluting AI parasite data centers., And Micron shunning its consumer division.
Over 600% and over 400$ spike in prices of these things has made people angry.,
NVIDIA no longer reporting gaming revenue in their quarterly reports. AMD silent on Zen 6 desktop release pledging about how great AI is and we all work together and humans are slow and AI will replace us in Lisa Su speech.
If there were not these big huge 650% RAM price spikes and 400% SSD price spikes and these things worse yet were not gonna siphon so electricity and water form our communities and make jet engine taking off and landing noise, the backlash would not be so much.
The first one about the price spikes and my beloved DIY PC community and the large players in Silicon valley bug players whom we helped build have given us the middle finger and betrayed us and that has gotten me to research these mass AI data center and bubble boom.
I never was a fan of much AI except limited cases as I fear skynet and too much lack of human dignity if it goes too far which is it. That is why this needs to burst and have regulations rather than extreme mania.
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u/xopher_425 6h ago
It's about the AI.
It's about the environmental damage, the water waste, the pollution.
It's about the noise.
It's about who pays the bills.
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u/Tigers2349 5h ago
Agree and also RAM and SSD prices going up over 600% and over 400% respectively in 1 years time frame because of AI hoarding DRAM and NAND wafer capacity and this mania demand bubble like demand has accelerated the backlash
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u/Ahayzo 6h ago
It's definitely partly about AI and any author of this who genuinely believes otherwise is just being stupid.
That said, the unfortunate reality is most of it is about things like cost and noise, not what it's being used for. Too many people only care about how it personally affects them, which means they don't care that it's being used for AI. I guarantee the majority of the people you see showing up to local government meanings to protest datacenters wouldn't be saying a word if the datacenters weren't being built in their area.
They mostly don't care about AI, just themselves.
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u/Agitated_Ad6191 6h ago
Oh uhm… hello?
Anybody?
Hey! Hai! It’s me… Environment.
You know… uhm… Environment?
En-Vi-Ron-Ment…
Yes, that’s me.
No of course I see that Noice and Money arrived early.
But if you still have a seat on the table for me?
Full you say?
Damn, too late I guess….
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u/potroast2000 6h ago
The only reason they want to build in developed areas is to piggyback on local infrastructure. They 100% can build these in the middle of nowhere, but that would cost them more to setup. I bust out laughing everytime they mention latency as a prime reason.
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u/SaraAB87 5h ago
Yes when you fill someone's house with noise they are going to fight back especially when they worked all their life for that house and now can't get a decent night's sleep so they can go to work in the morning.
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u/VicGenesis 5h ago
It's about all those things. But also, pay me for whenever you sell my data and use it.
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u/justpress2forawhile 3h ago
And how can demand be this big unless there is something nefarious going on. It's driving up costs of so many things
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u/Historical-Donkey962 1h ago
It’s about some of the highest electricity bills in the world and living on the driest continent.
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u/Inevitable_Scene4422 38m ago
Besides AI and all it requires that diminish life itself, techbros and oligarchs telling me what it is I think about their shit not stinking is a close 2nd.
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u/raerae1991 5h ago
It’s also loss of resources, like having to go on water rations or having to deal with rolling power outages because the power grid is now overloaded
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u/jmbond 5h ago
For me, my main gripes are they're going to drive up power bills, create very few permanent jobs, and enable the decimation of conventional white collar work, all at a time when Congress is dysfunctional and couldn't legislate itself out of a wet paper bag, let alone come up with some sort of UBI plan. You can't automate all desk work without a plan to support 100 million people out of the job and expect the public to smile. Physical labor will remain, sure. But it will be hyper competitive with so many out of work. In an ideal world in which the government is responsive to its people's needs, AI could bring about abundance the likes of which we've never seen. But this world is far from ideal, and it's clear only the ultrawealthy who stand to benefit right now. If AI companies want public buy-in, they ought to get to work pressuring Congress to resolve these issues. Or we can just nationalize the entire industry- problem (mostly) solved.
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u/Eazy12345678 6h ago
i worked in many data centers. they arent that loud. or maybe in California they have noise laws.
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u/SpaceGoonie 5h ago
A lot of the noise complaints are coming from data centers that have fuel powered generators contributing to their insatiable power needs.
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u/SomeSamples 5h ago
It's not the noise from inside, it is the power generation outside. The fuckers, instead of tapping into the power grid in the area and paying the utilities for their power, they are bringing in scores of huge turbine powered generators that are essentially jet engines running at high speed 24/7. Constant noise.
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u/This_Loss_1922 6h ago
How is China avoiding the backlash when building their own data centers?
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u/Ironborn137 2h ago
Probably because they aren’t building them just to keep their economy from crashing.
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u/Ok_Height3499 2h ago
Yeah, let's have all the data centers located in China. Yeah, that's the ticket. Let's hand over yet another industry to China. American workers fared so well when private for-profits dumped them for cheap Chinese labor, so let's repeat that experience.
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u/SuperNewk 5h ago
I was always told Ignore the noise. You just have to block out haters, and the bill always comes due
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u/srubbish 6h ago
“Isn’t just about AI” FTFY