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Amazon's New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States (futurism.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 60 points 1 month ago (32 children)

It's in one of the sunniest places in the US too. 6.0 kWh/m²/day of solar irradiance. There's even already a relatively large solar farm in the same county.

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  • [–] 80 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    Wait, it does not run on solar, even partially? JFC.

    edit: yep.

    Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.

    It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

    🤦

    Does greed know no end in this country?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    It‘s universally known by now that new mega data centers are generally powered by gas. And it‘s the same everywhere in the world. Destroying them and prohibit exorbitant wealth are measures that are long overdue already. We genuinely do not need all that calculating power. Not for this high of a price.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (19 children)

    If I were king they could run data centers with solar and fans. No outside power, no outside water.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 month ago* (18 children)

    You realize they are for sifting through the massive amount of surveillance data using AI right? They aren’t for ChatGPT. They are for categorizing and watching every person on the planet 1984 style.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    that's my biggest worry, more data centers won't lower the cost of LLM tokens.

    The only reason they want so much compute power is to have AI agents watching and annotating everything flock cameras see.

    not just license plate readers (a raspberry pi could handle that). but everything.

    My paranoia is that in 5 years, if you protest, the police will come to arrest you with a long list of every "crime" you have committed: driving holding you phone, no seatbelt, a recipt flew out of your pockets... a long list of petty meaningless violations.

    and they'll have that list for everyone.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.

    They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.

    Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.

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  • [+] -10 points 1 month ago (13 children)

    Do you have a source for this?

    Running an LLM is significantly less resource intensive than training it, and all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    They’re literally buying up all the computing resources so that we can’t get any.

    We will all have to communicate though walled gardens on dumb tablets.

    They can quickly summarize vast amounts of text looking for any “undesirable” patterns using LLMs.

    We will all have to rent computing time from them.

    This is the point, this has been the point for a long time, it’s just that LLMs were the perfect storm of “impressive to rubes” and “resource hungry”. Micron has already eliminated its consumer brand, Crucial. Hell, Peter Thiel (the Palantir guy) goes around giving talks about how “being against AI is the antichrist” just to make sure that all the remaining brainwashed sheep fall for the ruse.

    This shit is not hard to see. They want to own our future entirely and they want us to pay them for the privilege.

    Capitalism was a fucking mistake.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

    all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI

    Amazon? Nah, it has commercial interest in this, not scientific*.

    Also, MAGA is pushing this like crazy, and destroying the planet in the process. For the next 10 years there's by law practically no regulation wrt anything AI.

    That said:

    keep up the breakneck pace of US-American companies racing to create AGI more AI, or ELLM = even larger language models

    This affects the whole world, esp. if other governments (looking at EU) simply swallow the narrative hook line sinker.

    Fuck This Shit

    * If you say they are chasing AGI you mean that they are willing to make decisions that will further that goal, not just further profits. And I do not believe that for one second.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    I didn't mean to imply it was scientific, any more than what OpenAI is doing is scientific. It's all commercial.

    I'm not sure what the rest of your comment is supposed to mean. They are chasing AGI. That doesn't mean they'll create it, of course, but that's what they're aiming at.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Nono, I'm sticking to my statement. If you say they are chasing AGI you mean that they are willing to make decisions that will further that goal, not just further profits. And I do not believe that for one second. I also don't believe AGI is anywhere in the near or even medium future for us.

    That said, they might say that they have such lofty goals.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    I'm not going to dwell on this much longer, but your mistake is that AGI is a lofty goal, and not driven by greed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (6 children)

    I've seen your other pro-AI comments, always trying to gaslight people who you think know less than you. That is your mistake.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    You consider what I've said to be "Pro AI"? lol

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    OK what is your stance towards AI? You always seem to be defending "it"

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    My stance towards AI is complicated. I think it's an amazing technology with the potential to change the world for the better, but also the potential to change the world for the worse. I don't trust it in the hands of giant for-profit corporations, and think we should, among other things, legislate some regulations to ensure transparency and prevent it from being used in ways harmful to privacy and democracy. I also acknowledge that technological advances don't go in reverse, and AI is never going away.

    Does that answer your question?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    It does.

    If not for the environmental impact which makes it an absolute no-no for the foreseeable future I might even agree with you except that my divided stance already starts one step earlier:

    I think it’s an amazing technology

    Maybe it was that 10 years ago but I find it hard to see it that way when people constantly state that they don't even know what's happening inside it (black box) and that whatever development has happened since then was heavily if not completely influenced by interests of power & money.

    That said, there might be some models out there that have little or nothing to do with the mainstream development, and I recognize that, but I would not call them AI writ large - that's what Big Tech does as described above.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.

    You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.

    It'd be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.

    Edit: And if you aren't storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn't reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    At that scale you aren't using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.

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