[captainkrtek]

Agreed, seen a number of short form news pieces / docs on the effects of datacenter development across different parts of America. Pollution, noise, lights, water impacts, energy costs, etc. not a lot to like from them, and they create very few jobs in relation to the community.

[machinationu]

AI data centers will be the job destroyers, not creators.

100 local people to maintain the data center while it replaces 1 million people with the AIs running inside

[rileymat2]

If we can deal with the personal economics of the transition, isn’t freeing up human capital to do something else a good thing?

[lanyard-textile]

Yes, unfortunately we cannot deal with the personal economics of such a transition :)

[watwut]

The upper class who holds all the power does not want people to have good life. They want to extract as much as possible from most of us.

So, no, because said human capital is holding shorter end of the stick and will be worst off.

[Plasmoid]

CGP Grey once asked "What happens to humans when it becomes uneconomic to employ them?" eg, the value of their economic output is functionally zero.

[joquarky]

If you like speculative fiction on this topic, read Manna by Marshall Brain while you still can (the author died not long ago, so it may not stay up).

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

[timmytokyo]

We should just develop cold fusion. It's gotta be easy, right?

[Imustaskforhelp]

I 100% agree that AI data centers are bad for people.

In my opinion, Compute-related data centers are a good product tho. Offering up some gpu services might be good but honestly I will tell you what happened (similar to another comment I wrote)

AI gave these data centers companies tons of money (or they borrowed) and then they brought gpus from nvidias and became gpu-centric (also AI centric) to jump even more on the hype

these are bad The core offering of datacenters to me feels like it should be normal form of compute (CPU,ram,storage,as an example yabs performance of the whole server) and not "just what gpu does it have"

Offering up some gpu on the side is perfectly reasonable to me if need be perhaps where the workloads might need some gpu but overall compute oriented datacenters seem nice.

Hetzner is a fan favourite now (which I deeply respect) and for good measure and I feel like their modelling is pretty understandable, They offer GPU's too iirc but you can just tell from their website that they love compute too

Honestly the same is true for most Independent cloud providers. The only places where we see a complete saturation of AI centric data centers is probably the American trifecta (Google,azure and amazon) and Of course nvidia,oracle etc.

Compute oriented small-to-indie data centers/racks are definitely pleasant although that market has raced to the bottom, but only because let's be really honest, The real incentives for building softwares happens when VSCode forks make billions so people (techies atleast) usually question such path and non-techies just don't know how to sell/compete in the online marketplaces usually.