alt Hacker NewsI was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
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zozbot234 • today at 4:50 PM
These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
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Well, stuff tends not to get completely wasted, but:
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.