The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.
Can we finally call them machine cities? And we’re losing the war against the machines, by the way.
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…
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.
What are these data centers to be used for? People say AI, but that’s not specific enough. This shit is surveillance state.
Have you ever played Cyberpunk 2077?
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
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
They do quantify them. There’s been counters for that. The people speak out against them at town halls. It still goes up.
Okay. How is Mr Wonderful actually going to pay for this?
High-royalty, low-equity that sounds better than it is.
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
You mean Costco, à la Idiocracy?
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Costco.
I smell future competition
161 km² in commie units
Thanks for the conversion and go fuck yourself for calling the world standard commie
If that’s going to be one humongous superstructure, zoned inside, then if this fails, they might get a new city. Superstructures like this are nice, just nobody usually builds them (after 50s and 60s, I suppose) for residential areas.
One can repurpose the space for multi-story apartments (I suppose ceilings will be much higher than needed), or malls, or literally everything.
Or factories, if there are problems with exporting orders to southeast Asia.
If this even gets built.
Or if it doesn’t fail, then heat and noise pollution, I suppose. And grid load. Not nice.
That’s astonishing. How many servers will be running in that thing? Billions? Am I missing something?
Zero servers are ever gonna run in this thing, it’s just… even more obvious than with all the other fucking absued data center proposals.
Apparently this will show the Chinese! Is this all about who has the biggest dong?
No, it’s about who has the MOST dong, and that’s obviously Vietnam.
This randomly reminds me of when I played a game in a server with mostly Vietnam players and they were constantly complaining how because it wasn’t in their market everything cost massive amounts of dong in the game shop.
Context: the currency Vietnam uses is named Dong.
Who was really driving the boat Kevin?
One of many reasons why I’m looking for work in another state. Or country.
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?
That depends, are you interested in money?
I like money.
I can’t believe you like money too. We should hang out.
Remember your LOTO before you snip the wires
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.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
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.
intention to be used with Palantir, google, MS for mass surveillance and by israel.
