I don't think people have a problem with compute based datacenters themselves
I feel like people have problem with AI oriented datacenters (which is becoming the majority of datacenters considering that datacenters make an shit ton of money selling AI aka shovels during gold rush)
Another thing is that these datacenters have very high levels of compute directly linked to the consumer of an application
As an example, you have a simple app, some message gets pushed by customer or database query or simple usage, its all good, at a datacenter level its power costs are miniscule
Now compare that to datacenters which have gpu's so they have applications like chatgpt (let's imagine) running on them, now these AI services are used by people themselves.
Now instead of simple applications and executions, Perhaps a trillion parameters models are running now. These are beyond computationally expensive even if we compare them to normal applications
Now I just searched and google's gemini runs 1.5 BILLION such prompts per day and chatgpt runs 2.5 BILLION prompts per day
Now, these prompts, they aren't stable all around the day, I have heard these to be very varying and when power consumption varies, it really impacts the performance of the grid itself
Another aspect is the sheer size, One would imagine that AI Bubble might give them more money and it does but the energy costs seems to me to be so high and perhaps also the fact that AI bubble gives these companies tons of free money which they "invest" aka buy/(lease?) year govt. contracts a lot of electricity
The govt. can only build so much capacity for these electricity and they (lobbying? and many other efforts) when get sold to datacenters really strains the electricity which thus increases the rates of electricity (and in a similar fashion perhaps water too) for the average american.
TLDR the way I read it: compute is cheap. There are always gonna be refurbished old compute which is gonna be too "old" (3-5 years because of deprication but that hardware is a beast) for these guys to use.
Nothing stops a simple guy who loves tech to open a mini datacenter perhaps :)
Who knows what might happen and I was extremely pessimistic about the datacenters not for these reasons but rather that ram prices were rising and I was worried that the whole industry might increase compute prices too but it seems that asus is opening up their ram production for consumers so starting out datacenters is possible
let's see what happens though. And I was worried a bit same as you but I feel like compute prices themselves are pretty chill/can remain chill. I understand the worries tho so looking forward to a discussion about it.
I feel like people have problem with AI oriented datacenters (which is becoming the majority of datacenters considering that datacenters make an shit ton of money selling AI aka shovels during gold rush)
Another thing is that these datacenters have very high levels of compute directly linked to the consumer of an application
As an example, you have a simple app, some message gets pushed by customer or database query or simple usage, its all good, at a datacenter level its power costs are miniscule
Now compare that to datacenters which have gpu's so they have applications like chatgpt (let's imagine) running on them, now these AI services are used by people themselves.
Now instead of simple applications and executions, Perhaps a trillion parameters models are running now. These are beyond computationally expensive even if we compare them to normal applications
Now I just searched and google's gemini runs 1.5 BILLION such prompts per day and chatgpt runs 2.5 BILLION prompts per day
Now, these prompts, they aren't stable all around the day, I have heard these to be very varying and when power consumption varies, it really impacts the performance of the grid itself
Another aspect is the sheer size, One would imagine that AI Bubble might give them more money and it does but the energy costs seems to me to be so high and perhaps also the fact that AI bubble gives these companies tons of free money which they "invest" aka buy/(lease?) year govt. contracts a lot of electricity
The govt. can only build so much capacity for these electricity and they (lobbying? and many other efforts) when get sold to datacenters really strains the electricity which thus increases the rates of electricity (and in a similar fashion perhaps water too) for the average american.
TLDR the way I read it: compute is cheap. There are always gonna be refurbished old compute which is gonna be too "old" (3-5 years because of deprication but that hardware is a beast) for these guys to use.
Nothing stops a simple guy who loves tech to open a mini datacenter perhaps :)
Who knows what might happen and I was extremely pessimistic about the datacenters not for these reasons but rather that ram prices were rising and I was worried that the whole industry might increase compute prices too but it seems that asus is opening up their ram production for consumers so starting out datacenters is possible
let's see what happens though. And I was worried a bit same as you but I feel like compute prices themselves are pretty chill/can remain chill. I understand the worries tho so looking forward to a discussion about it.