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.
Pretty blah week. Took the week off and some of the next to try and relax and recover. Did take a trip earlier in the week which was cool, but my dad ended up in the hospital for a couple days and I ended up scrapping my other travel plans. Had some work and family drama pop up too so I haven't really been able to relax and find the peace that I had wanted on my time off.
In so far as fitness, its been good still. Went to the gym, worked out at home, or cycled pretty much every day, so its been another saving grace from my otherwise not so great week.
Going to meet up with a couple of old friends today and hope its the start of a turnaround in my fortunes for the rest of the week/month.