alt Hacker NewsI don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
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I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.
> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
> this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over
I wonder if these "classic projects" have been morphing into jet engine projects as energy use vs energy available have changed.
personally datacenters have affected you and me: ssds, hard disks and memory are super expensive; electricity costs have gone up
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.