I wrote below in 2022 on HN [1] when everyone was panicking about AWS growth slowing down.
* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33384628
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
AI's appetite for computation scales with the willingness of their funders to provide heavily discounted tokens to the general public.
The basic play here is to get companies to fire people and adapt internal processes to the current heavily subsidized AI farms, and then jack the rates once the switching costs become untenable ... particularly if they can get a huge percentage of human programmers to quit the industry.
This is effectively "dumping" in the economic sense.
Think the basic play is to IPO or be acquired so investors make their 10x and someone else deals with the enshittification later
Missouri ratepayers will be able to verify Amazon's promise not to pass on the datacenter's costs on their monthly electricity bills!
It's so retarded. Vote for a government that makes it impossible to build more electricity generation capacity, then cry when electricity prices go up.
If I were Amazon, I would tell them I'm giving them exactly what they voted for good and hard, and if they didn't want more expensive electricity they should have not voted for more expensive electricity.
>It's so retarded. Vote for a government that makes it impossible to build more electricity generation capacity, then cry when electricity prices go up.
What the absolute fuck are you talking about? Missouri is solidly Republican run at the state level and they are very friendly to corporations.
> Amazon is also committing over $7 million in direct community contributions
7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw
All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?
Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.
Everyone on this site has been cashing checks building the job eating machine for years. The concern is only pouring out now that it may not need us anymore.
I am not against AI but putting automation tools is in a different category than "AGI, you only need specs and they do the work for you".
20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation).
Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.
You have no frame of reference, Donny.
I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals.
Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it.
Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design.
What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.
It's speculative fiction after all.
It's easy to understand once you understand the power structures at play.
The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality.
And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized.
Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects.
What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources.
Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.
All of the things you say have been around in the form of fringe conspiracy theories for a long time.
Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)
Luddites were not against the advent of new technology. They were against capitalists using new technology as an excuse to cut skilled labour and not offer any avenue for reskilling etc.
Which is what's happening again.
Don't bother, you will just be downvoted to oblivion.
Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1].
That video is completely fake btw.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"?
Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
If they also solve fusion, famine, climate disaster, cancer, dementia and child development disorders it isn’t as clear cut
Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick.
This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.
So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
I'm just taking destruction of democracy for granted; the question is if we get anything in return.
Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.
The word happiness, fulfillment or even freedom didn't come to mind?
Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
The number of realists on this site is encouraging.
> now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?
Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.
Because we can learn?
How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really?
> that's literally solving unsolved math problems,
It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results.
Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do
The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them.
Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...
And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea.
We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there.
I'm much less pessimistic about this.
Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.
What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up.
By capacity it's trending from around 60% now to 80% by 2030.
There is LOTS of reporting about this. One example:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsof...
The datacenter is still heating the atmosphere and consuming enormous amounts of electricity, which also heats the atmosphere. And it still won't solve our global climate disaster and is far more likely to contribute to a lot of bad things happening for humans.
Compared to what? Meat consumption? Land use regulations? This stuff is just not a drop in the bucket in comparison to the decisions we actually tell our government to make.
Beef consumption dwarfs data centers in terms of environmental damage for no good reason and does much worse things to water, but nobody cares cuz beef is a status symbol for people. AI is easy to hate and requires no sacrifice. But giving up red meat is kind of tough so nobody does it.
It’s clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. Data centers don’t use water.
Amazons business is just cloud services tbh. I dont know what Amazons customer base looks like in aggregate but I bet its more interesting than just ads.
That's what pays the bills. You wouldn't expect someone to spend this kind of money without a way to make it back (and then some).
Most of the tech startup ecosystem for the last 20 years has been spending crazy money without a clear plan for how to make it back.
The plan was always to get acquired by Google and then killed off two years later!
It really does have that 1998 feel to it.
It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!
Which does technically distribute wealth to thousands of people
Have you considered becoming a shareholder?
Five years ago it would be to serve ads.
Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends.
Or generate political slops to rile up older people
common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat
It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.
Unpopular take I know. But ads are a source of revenue for much of the free and open internet. The alternatives are paid features that are a regressive tax on poorer people who can't afford them or fork up larger amounts of their discretionary budget.
While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.
Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.
We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.
The free option with libraries was somewhat limited because libraries rarely had more than a small number of copies of a given book or newspaper.
Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity.
I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't.
The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic.
That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity).
Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.
The hard part is that when you have a few companies competing to do something, they very quickly start doing it for less money than government does because they innovate to compete with each other. You can take a snapshot in time and pretend cutting 20% off the top is worth it, but by the time you do the political organization you've usually lost the plot. Plus all of the mechanics of taxation and bureaucracy are usually more expensive…
Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.
Tell that to São Paulo.
They're going to need quite a lot more ads to try to sell stuff to people who don't have jobs anymore because of all the datacenters built for AI.
Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!
Frankly, it should be a crime, a felony even, to purchase something if you haven't seen an ad for it beforehand. Think of the poor middlemen!
> But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
If only...
I do believe that access to commercial AI should be regulated, heavily taxed, and controlled just as much as access to dangerous chemicals and weapons. Only this way the best AI models are more likely to indeed be used for frugal purposes (sadly, however, including ads).
Wouldn't that just incentivize more consumption of models that fall outside of the jurisdiction of whatever you are proposing would be in charge of taxing these so-called best AI models?
If you get caught with illegal guns and illegal chemicals, well... there are consequences. Bad actors will always find a way, at the risk of getting caught.
However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
Wait, so now you are saying that consumption of models that fall outside of the tax jurisdiction would be illegal?? What other goods or services have this sort of precedent?
"API call to a company that routed it to a Chinese model? Believe it or not, jail."
So what does one of these full time data center jobs look like, day to day? If I’m a software engineer I feel like I’d have to move and get a pay decrease to actually work at one of these? I mean until AI finally puts me out of a job. I guess I wouldn’t really be qualified to work one of these jobs?
The blokes I meet who work 8x5 from a data center tend to spend their days installing hardware, deinstalling hardware, providing remote hands (usually cabling, sometimes console access)building racks, managing power supplies and maintaining asset registers. And escorting idiots like me around when things get technical.
If you've never had an opportunity to spend time in a datacenter as a software developer, that's unfortunate but also far too common. What things look like on the inside vary company to company. Generally you're in an OSHA-abiding environment, so safety shoes, ear and eye protection, sometimes gloves.
There's a variety of roles. Security, electricians, HVAC engineers, generally some type of site foreman-ask role, logistics (depending on the size of the place), and technicians (for a lack of a better word, feels like every place calls them something different). There's a variety of roles that often float between sites or oversee many sites, depending again on the scale of the place. AWS is huge. Bigger than you're imagining, so there's quite a few levels deep and include real estate folks as well as construction roles. If you go and look at job postings, you'll even see roles for nuclear engineers at some companies.
But generally what you're talking about here are what I'm calling the technicians. They're responsible for wheeling racks into place (depending on the company they may also be responsible for unloading the trucks). Cabling is nearly always outsourced these days (though not the design of the cables), so rolling a rack into place generally involves securing it to the floor and connecting power, data, and more often than not now-a-days liquid cooling.
The other part of their job is "troubleshooting" failed hardware. Again, really depends on the company. Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up. I'm sure there are some great places to be a tech where you get to rip apart servers and bust out the multimeter, that to my understanding is not how the hyperscalers who actually hyper-scale do it.
There's some cleaning, parts management, destroying broken hard drives, shoveling snow off the roof (no lie), and a variety of other odd tasks.
If you ever have the opportunity to check out one of those places it can be a riot and a real eye opener. Depends again on the company though, some of those places have insane security (metal detectors, badge+pin, turnstile door procedures) which make visits super un-fun if they're even allowed outside of legit business reasons. Other companies... well I'm glad that's not where I store my data.
Back "in the day" (2005 give or take a handful of years) techs would often write their own automation and even build some simple services.
And yes, the jobs don't pay particularly well depending upon what it is. Electricians and such command decent wages, but the security guards and techs don't make crazy amounts. I think folks doing contract cabling can come out ahead.
Anyhow, SWEs are wildly insulated from the realities of what things look like on the ground. Maybe that's a good thing, IDK.
Not the poster, but I highly recommend checking out your company's data center if you can (and if your company has one). Nothing like seeing where your apps or data actually land (and the physical security put in place to protect them)
You'll especially be in luck if your company is an old and has a mainframe or two. Those are incredible to behold. Masterful engineering.
> Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up.
Very true. I've heard stories of how technicians struggle with friends/family perceptions here. Since a lot of these datacenters are in rural communities, they are perceived as being technical wizards to be working there. But in reality they are doing as you say - just following a preprogrammed script with very little scope for any sort of creative problem solving.
Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though? Anyway amazon already has plenty of those in house.
Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.
> Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though?
It would be rather silly is a multi-billion dollar investment went down because, for some reason, admins couldn't remote in.
That's startup to mid sized traditional company thinking. Not at the hyperscaler enterprise scale.
Anybody working in even classic datacenter physical ops already knows how to plug a KVM with a cell modem into a box to let the engineers remote in. That's assuming the racks aren't already built to support this natively these days.
Come on, this is the industry that is going gangbusters on the fetish of mass unemployment and deskilling, you don't think they're doing everything they can to have to only hire a few local bodies at minimum wage to basically pull a bad rack out and slot a new spare in?
It's not easy, actually. You will likely need to be a licensed electrician or a licensed plumber. Both occupations require around 4000 hours of apprenticeship.
Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.
Oh! Thank goodness! 138 megawatts, they might be able to support the air conditioning systems with that much power.
I'm relieved to hear it's 138 megawatts instead of 6 to 10 gigawatts we keep hearing about elsewhere.
For 6–10 gigawatt data centers I consider what else that amount of power could support. At current desalination efficiencies, 6 gigawatts of continuous power could produce roughly 11–14 million acre-feet of freshwater per year, comparable to the historical annual flow of the Colorado River.
So a single 6 GW power supply could theoretically generate enough freshwater to replace most or all of the Colorado River's annual flow. The famous river that is stretched thin but supports up to around 45 million people from Denver all the way to San Diego and even Mexico. So the comparison is we can have a single AI datacenter or a drought-proof water supply for a region constantly under drought restrictions.
I'm not saying don't build the other dozen or so 6 to 10 gigawatt data centers everybody keeps talking about. I'm just saying maybe we can do one less of those and use some of that power to support ocean water desalination instead.
138 megawatts is how much the company is investing in a "carbon-free energy project in the state" - not the power usage of the datacenter.
My mistake. Hopefully its less than 3-400 megawatts because that is the power needed to get San Diego onto 100% ocean water desalination. Currently 3/4ths of San Diego's water comes from the Colorado. That would be a big deal for everybody else in the Southwest.
The reason desalination hasn't happened in california is because of political entities like the coastal commission, which blocked a desalination plant that would serve most of LA's water.
Also, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.
138 MW is also nameplate capacity multiply that by effective utilization rate for ex solar (~20%) and it’s meaningless compared to the scale of the project.
It's a few years old, but sorta related: https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...
What a refreshing change from a post like this on Reddit. It would be hysterics like they’re emptying lakes and using electricity (gasp!) and if you get really close it’s 60db (!!) loud. I only wish we had a competent administration at this point that would put in clever laws like requiring data centers to build out accompanying solar+battery buildouts to power themselves or something.
That's not far from St. Louis and Fort Leonard Wood, a hub for basic training among other things. I wonder if that had any impact in the location.
I imagined the location has to do with the nearby Callaway Nuclear power plant, and the solar projects that Ameren have been putting up in Montgomery County for the past few years.
How so? Not seeing the connection.
Data centers are critical infrastructure and having them near military bases could be seen as a security benefit.
The AWS status page still shows UAE as disrupted https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Fort Leonard Wood is a basic training base. It has no meaningful defenses.
It’s about 80 miles from the city proper, out in the middle of nowhere essentially, so unlikely to employ anyone that actually lives in St. Louis.
AI works by responding to prompts. So if you’re dissatisfied with what it produces, consider a critique of its user.
So much for agi... so glad we have more bs to work with in this industry