once again billionaires get the 'volume' price break which poor people have to subsidize.
awesome.. 'progress'
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
317 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
72356 readers
2814 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I was just thinking electricity should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive each Gw is. It'll never happen, but if we wanted to tackle this issue, it's what we should do.
Sounds like tax brackets.
Data center riots when they cause a blackout during the summers 3rd heatwave?
The irony is that they often have backup diesel generators, so even if they cause a blackout they will still be able to service everyone's AI requests to do their homework for them
do they have 2 GW of backup generators, though?
A properly built data center will be able to cover its full usage. They are just scaling up a known method. High availability is built into these things.
When a data center loses power for any length of time, it is a big deal requiring a full investigation and mitigation.
that's a lot of fuel. and smoke too.
and I assume they need to replace all that fuel once in a while even if unused, because it goes bad in a few years
They do. There's some companies that will condition, polish, clean and even eventually rotate out the fuel as part of a subscription.
Between maintaining power supply, backup power and cooling, data centre facilities maintenance is more than a full time job.
What Zuckerberg did not mention is that "Let's go build" refers not only to the massive data center but also three new Meta-subsidized, gas power plants and a transmission line to fuel it serviced by Entergy Louisiana, the region’s energy monopoly.
Thank god our power is being sucked up for cheating and generating AI porn.
You mean three weeks into summer? We started our summer with a massive heatwave where I am.
So we spent decades working on energy conservation, switching to LED light bulbs, efficient AC, etc just to see it all get sucked into these fucking data and AI centers.
Just wait and see what happens if the Big Stupid Bill passes. It's got shit in there making it nearly impossible to regulate AI.
It's really uplifting when you put it that way, yes
Data center owners should work as aggressively as possible to build solar and wind capabilities. It would be best for all parties involved. They'd get cheaper energy and it would benefit everyone by not polluting as much.
Even if they cannot power all of their energy needs with renewables they could build some every year.
These companies are so rich they can easily afford it.
I have a personal conspiracy theory that part of the AI hype is pushed by dirty energy companies. Most American politicians say we can't remove dirty energy plants until we have enough clean energy to replace them. AI (and some other technologies) increase energy demand in a way that counters any clean energy production being built, such that the dirty energy production will always be needed unless we're willing to shut some things down.
Politicians say we can't scale down production below demand, so dirty energy companies benefit most from inflating demand instead of shutting down and being replaced with clean alternatives.
You guys know Murphy's law that says anything that can go wrong will go wrong? I think it was an indirect law about capitalism that extends enshittification. "If anything can be enshittified for profit, it will be." and that includes fucking up infrastructure and dare I say progress.
4,000,000 Square Feet = 37.161216 Hectares
4,000,000 Square Feet = 0.37161216 Square Kilometers