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.
I don't think we have to worry about this stuff actually happening. The US economy will collapse before they will pull this stuff off. All this does is accelerate the decline. Its where ridiculous wealth hoarding meets actual scarcity of resources. These people think just because they have money they can get anything they need. They're reaching a point where they have plenty of money, but the actual resources they need don't exist. It will cause an economic implosion.
Idk, throwing money and violence at things can be pretty effective.
It can't materialize matter though. Theres only so much water, minerals, etc to steal via imperialism. And much of what is left for them to steal is protected by actually competent and capable militaries that won't let them just take it.
Yeah this seems about as realistic as Neom
I mean, I hope you're right. But I think you're being optimistic. Imo, if there's gonna be a collapse, it's gonna have to come from revolution else or we're just gonna get some Mad Max type industrial resource Warlords with the rest of us still fucked into subservience. So, like now, but even more mask off.😅
I think you misunderstood me maybe. That IS likely what it will be like. The conditions in the west are likely to be miserable. The west is not the entire world though. Imperialism is becoming more, and more unsustainable. As the imperialist machine collapses the west will turn inward. Their resources will be limited, but they will go full fash. The rest of the world should be ok. Especially places like China. Because the west will know they can't really do anything to them.
When i talk about a collapse stopping this project or others like it im talking about a collapse in their ability to command such massive material wealth. The western economies are heavily financialized, and produce very little of value compared to their GDPs. It's all inflated. As the people with all this money start to want to purchase more material things then actually exist. And they can't go steal it from somewhere else because they've already looted all the easy to steal from nations dry. They'll turn inward. Start fighting amongst themselves over what they DO have.
If a mega-data center needs X amount of water, and Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc all WANT it. They can't all have it once that X amount gets big enough. So of course at first it's simple bidding wars, but eventually it devolves into actual conflict. When they all have endless amounts of money, and the actual material goods are not endless it inevitably turns into armed conflict over those material goods amongst themselves.
Just as in Nazi Germany the colonial practices of europe were brought home to europe the neo-imperialist practices of the US will be brought home to the US. It is already happening in many ways.
I wasn't saying things would be good. Far from it. I'm saying they'll be so bad it will be impossible for them to do projects like this. They'll be far too busy fighting over the scraps of Americas Empire to be building ridiculous things like this anymore.
I think the big things to realize here is that the elites of western society have forgotten what made capitalism work in the first place. It used to be you invested money to MAKE things. You built a factory, made toys, sold the toys, made profits. They've created a system now where theyre putting all this money into stuff that doesn't make anything. Wasting massive amounts of resources on stupid shit that produces nothing of actual value. It will destroy them. Crypto, NFTs, Speculative investing, rent seeking, subscriptions, inflated prices, feature creep, etc. All symptoms of an increasingly financialized economy that is decoupled from actual productive value.