You're all on the internet in your community and using software services so that's like saying you have no benefit from having a power station when you all use electricity. They have to be somewhere
Sure, if we’re talking about “the internet” in general.
I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.
You are absolutely smart enough to know the difference between a data center for internet-distributed software and a data center full of GPUs solely for AI, along with the attendant increase in power and cooling needs. Don’t play dumb, please.
I'm not playing dumb but you I'm not sure. Just think for 2 seconds why datacenters exist. It's not billionnaires scrolling tiktok and making all those AI pictures for Facebook. People want the thing the datacenters exist for. The same way they want disposable clothes made by slaves in far away countries. They just want the datacenters to be far away as well, not to stop them. It's the convenient hypocrisy of complaining about consumerism while swiping your credit card mindlessly, it's always someone else's problem.
I see you moving the goalposts! And that’s fine, because this is also wrong: the pace of AI datacenter construction far exceeds actual demand for AI datacenters or actual AI products. The current pace of construction is purely speculative.
Its if anything incrementally speculative, not purely, unless you think there's actually zero demand. And those datacenters are built to make money selling services, they aren't a vanity yacht.
I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.