This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can we finally call them machine cities? And we're losing the war against the machines, by the way.
No backlash unless they are dragging the council members out of their homes.
Which honestly needs to happen. Those council members should be fearing for their lives everytime they go outside. But Oleary probably gave them a fat paycheck so they will no longer have to live in the area.
They shouldn't be able to have dinner in peace
They shouldn't be able to have dinner
What are these data centers to be used for? People say AI, but that's not specific enough. This shit is surveillance state.
AI for the surveillance state.
Sort of like the center point of skynet.
Soon there will be heavily armed autonomous mechs walking the perimeter shooting everything organic within 100m the property border
Have you ever played Cyberpunk 2077?
No.
Why are they building these things in dry hot places, surely the one time real estate cost can’t dwarf all the other issues?
That's long-term thinking. I assume it's like a ponzi scheme: everyone who puts money into something like this thinks they'll cash out before the problems occur.
Why do I feel like the ones left holding the bag are going to be the taxpayers/residents somehow?
It's located on the Ruby Pipeline which will serve as the primary source of energy in the short term. Additionally, the data center being classified as a national security site, is located near the Utah Test and Training Range.
Longer term the facility is looking at nuclear facilities for power and the possibility for a runway and aviation facilities.
The primary customer of this facility will be the United States military.
This. US military is the target market. That people live there, that humans need water to live, and that powering this is going to entirely erase the local agriculture and wider ecosystems are all irrelevant. Deus Vult.~
This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project.
That doesn’t sound problematic at all…
All those shithole Red states are going to get raped by data centers, while the Blue states will force them to pay their way.
It’s not that black and white (or red and blue as the case may be). I live in a blue state that is also selling out to data centers under the guise of “job creation”.
Make them quantify jobs that they are creating
They city council is too busy counting the money they were given to pass this
Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged.
Good
"waaahhh death threats" is the usual retort whenever someone gets deserved criticism. Maybe try not doing things that make your constituents want to kill you?
To be fair, there are a lot of unhinged people who resort to actual death threats for shit that in no way deserves that level of intensity. It's probably one of the big reasons why everyone who's actually smart enough to run a city/state/country is also smart enough not to.
Gonna be a cool liminal space in the next 5 years when this inevitably fails and gets abandoned
Assuming that happens, I think we can look to Detroit, starting 50 years ago, for a good example of how awful we are at scaling down and retiring infrastructure at anything approaching this scale. Especially when the state doesn't care to require companies to clean up their mess.
My money is on Ikea acquiring the leftovers to easily set up new locations lol
Those data centers are jam packed with copper, and have far less security per kg than you'd think.
Lots and lots of RAM kicking around too, if you're a little short.
Is it even the type of RAM peasants like me are interested in?
No.
That depends, are you interested in money?
I like money.
I can't believe you like money too. We should hang out.
161 km² in commie units
That's astonishing. How many servers will be running in that thing? Billions? Am I missing something?
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Wtf would you even want to make something that big.
Thats a huge geographic vulnerability. You could still make huge ones but spread it out.
Greed. That's the entirety of the answer.
Whoever ticks and flicks these data centres is paid with grotesque amounts of money to approve this shit and to deal with the fallout.
Not all data centres are evil and the issue is nuanced. This one sounds pretty evil though.
9GW is totally insane and they're building a gas plant for it instead of renewables (although there's some solar too). It's closed loop so the water use fears once it's running are probably a bit overblown, but the construction itself is going to be ecologically insane. The thing is basically a data city, 162 square km is even larger than a lot of cities and involves building an entire power plant and new energy infrastructure. Building it is a full megaproject and even just noise pollution and the construction impacts will mess with bird migration etc. Obviously the whole thing isn't going to be full of data centre, some of that space is empty but still.
It's also going to have the US military as a major client so... Pretty high up there on the evil scale IMO.
I wouldn't say it's nuanced really.
It's either those involved with planning the construction are aware of and scale to account for the impact of the ecosystem and population surrounding their project, or they don't and plot a gigantic building with no environmental accountability. You can do an environmental impact assessment and follow it or you can choose to ignore it or half ass it; it's pretty cut and dry to me.
That's fair. The nuance that people lose is more that people are often painting them all with the same brush. Protesting any datacenter regardless of impact.
It becomes something like: "datacenters are evil and are a symbol of techno fascist distopia! If they build a datacenter in my city, the taps will run dry and Elon Musk will use it to make ai porn of my children!" Even if it's a small solar powered closed loop that provides VPS, storage and web hosting for nerds and small businesses.
I also do think there's also a scale of evil there. Some environmental impacts are not immediately obvious and might not be known about during planning. Some were built a long time ago with older tech and are a bit shitty but have a plan to transition to be more sustainable, etc.
The world is full of "alright but a little bit shit." It's not all perfect angels and mustache twirling villains.
I don't want to detract too much from the real villains though. Nobody needs a 9GW datacity for military ai.
Wym not all AI data centers?
I mean they're not all for AI and they're not all environmentally devastating.
This one very much is.
Which aren't environmentally devastating?
There are quite a few. The best ones are sustainable closed loop datacenters with on-site solar which is becoming pretty common across the world, especially for new builds. Often producing more power than they need and feeding it back to the grid (especially if the local government has an energy buy back scheme).
But most data centers are pretty tiny and just built into an office building with a bunch of server racks.
Depending on where you live, a quick web search for data centers in your local area will probably show up dozens of them of varying quality hosting people's websites and business apps etc. They aren't any scarier than anything else you find in a city. They're critical infrastructure that helps make the internet a thing. In most cases, if it wasn't a datacenter, it would be a car yard or a factory, etc.
But! There are also truly evil datacenters. Like this insane Utah monstrosity built for a shitty purpose and the size of a freaking city. An obscene monument to the US tech cesspool's hubris.
It would be a shame if the builders had to restart their work every day...
Good luck. The data center is classified as a national security site and has the Utah Test and Training Range base nearby.
They're building it with the intention of military security.
