The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.
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2 hoursCan we finally call them machine cities? And we’re losing the war against the machines, by the way.
- JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project.
That doesn’t sound problematic at all…
What are these data centers to be used for? People say AI, but that’s not specific enough. This shit is surveillance state.
AI for the surveillance state.
Sort of like the center point of skynet.
Soon there will be heavily armed autonomous mechs walking the perimeter shooting everything organic within 100m the property borderYes its surveillance state being built. Humans will work for Ai in exchange for basic income.
- BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafeEnglish1 day
All those shithole Red states are going to get raped by data centers, while the Blue states will force them to pay their way.
- snapoff@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 day
It’s not that black and white (or red and blue as the case may be). I live in a blue state that is also selling out to data centers under the guise of “job creation”.
- 19 hours
They city council is too busy counting the money they were given to pass this
- 00xide@lemmy.mlEnglish1 day
They do quantify them. There’s been counters for that. The people speak out against them at town halls. It still goes up.
- 2 days
Gonna be a cool liminal space in the next 5 years when this inevitably fails and gets abandoned
- 17 hours
Assuming that happens, I think we can look to Detroit, starting 50 years ago, for a good example of how awful we are at scaling down and retiring infrastructure at anything approaching this scale. Especially when the state doesn’t care to require companies to clean up their mess.
My money is on Ikea acquiring the leftovers to easily set up new locations lol
No backlash unless they are dragging the council members out of their homes.
- KC_Royalz@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Which honestly needs to happen. Those council members should be fearing for their lives everytime they go outside. But Oleary probably gave them a fat paycheck so they will no longer have to live in the area.
- [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish2 days
Why are they building these things in dry hot places, surely the one time real estate cost can’t dwarf all the other issues?
- 2 days
That’s long-term thinking. I assume it’s like a ponzi scheme: everyone who puts money into something like this thinks they’ll cash out before the problems occur.
Why do I feel like the ones left holding the bag are going to be the taxpayers/residents somehow?
- belochka@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
If I were justifying my account name, I’d suppose, for the purpose of future appearing interesting, this might be a coverup.
Such a structure is useful for many things, and while a DC doesn’t have to be that big, a factory producing real things on scale or mass housing or a prepared company town all benefit from being in one place.
So perhaps it’s being built as a DC, but in fact is going to be like a drone factory, or something equally dystopian-futuristic.
Or a humongous supercomputer, whatever.
I’m starting to think along plot lines of science fiction and space operas I’ve seen and read before, they were saying it’s harmful for my development, I didn’t believe them.
Another option - it’s, yes, a scheme and it won’t get built. Just pump and dump.
- crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
Because our tax dollars have been bankrolling this whole thing for a while now.
- 2 days
It’s located on the Ruby Pipeline which will serve as the primary source of energy in the short term. Additionally, the data center being classified as a national security site, is located near the Utah Test and Training Range.
Longer term the facility is looking at nuclear facilities for power and the possibility for a runway and aviation facilities.
The primary customer of this facility will be the United States military.
This. US military is the target market. That people live there, that humans need water to live, and that powering this is going to entirely erase the local agriculture and wider ecosystems are all irrelevant. Deus Vult.~
- redsand@infosec.pubEnglish1 day
This is also why Utah. They will staff it with mormons and have fiber runs already
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
they build it in red states because of the lack protest/resistance against it, at least from the gop.
- 1 day
Nobody is thinking this shit through long-term or short.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
evaporative cooling is better in a arid dry environment. of course this has the side effect of using ALOT more water than neccesarry. utah is already drier than salt.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
less likely in a dry environent, or the desert. fungi doesnt cant survive in extreme heat.
Those data centers are jam packed with copper, and have far less security per kg than you’d think.
Lots and lots of RAM kicking around too, if you’re a little short.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
apparenlty not any AI can be used by an individual since its not compatible.
- KC_Royalz@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.
Good
- vathecka@lemmy.radioEnglish2 days
“waaahhh death threats” is the usual retort whenever someone gets deserved criticism. Maybe try not doing things that make your constituents want to kill you?
- 2 days
To be fair, there are a lot of unhinged people who resort to actual death threats for shit that in no way deserves that level of intensity. It’s probably one of the big reasons why everyone who’s actually smart enough to run a city/state/country is also smart enough not to.
- 2 days
Local dude here stopped running for office due to death threats against them and their family… small, semi-rural, conservative town, the most important decision for which is… idk, tbh. Can’t honestly imagine why anyone would threaten someone here.
Which makes me want to run for that position instead. Fuck you people, I don’t have a family to worry about, and I’m not all that worried about dying myself. Solid chance I won’t even know about them since I don’t use social media, and barely check my mail… they’d have to actually act on the threats for it to rise to a level I’d notice, and boy oh boy would I love that. Talk about publicity for the campaign for doing nothing!
- Tabula_stercore@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
Thanks for the conversion and go fuck yourself for calling the world standard commie
That’s astonishing. How many servers will be running in that thing? Billions? Am I missing something?
- Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
Zero servers are ever gonna run in this thing, it’s just… even more obvious than with all the other fucking absued data center proposals.
- belochka@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
If that’s going to be one humongous superstructure, zoned inside, then if this fails, they might get a new city. Superstructures like this are nice, just nobody usually builds them (after 50s and 60s, I suppose) for residential areas.
One can repurpose the space for multi-story apartments (I suppose ceilings will be much higher than needed), or malls, or literally everything.
Or factories, if there are problems with exporting orders to southeast Asia.
If this even gets built.
Or if it doesn’t fail, then heat and noise pollution, I suppose. And grid load. Not nice.
- 2 days
Wtf would you even want to make something that big.
Thats a huge geographic vulnerability. You could still make huge ones but spread it out.
- Insekticus@aussie.zoneEnglish2 days
Greed. That’s the entirety of the answer.
Whoever ticks and flicks these data centres is paid with grotesque amounts of money to approve this shit and to deal with the fallout.
- TechLich@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
Not all data centres are evil and the issue is nuanced. This one sounds pretty evil though.
9GW is totally insane and they’re building a gas plant for it instead of renewables (although there’s some solar too). It’s closed loop so the water use fears once it’s running are probably a bit overblown, but the construction itself is going to be ecologically insane. The thing is basically a data city, 162 square km is even larger than a lot of cities and involves building an entire power plant and new energy infrastructure. Building it is a full megaproject and even just noise pollution and the construction impacts will mess with bird migration etc. Obviously the whole thing isn’t going to be full of data centre, some of that space is empty but still.
It’s also going to have the US military as a major client so… Pretty high up there on the evil scale IMO.
- girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish16 hours
I wouldn’t say it’s nuanced really.
It’s either those involved with planning the construction are aware of and scale to account for the impact of the ecosystem and population surrounding their project, or they don’t and plot a gigantic building with no environmental accountability. You can do an environmental impact assessment and follow it or you can choose to ignore it or half ass it; it’s pretty cut and dry to me.
- TechLich@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
That’s fair. The nuance that people lose is more that people are often painting them all with the same brush. Protesting any datacenter regardless of impact.
It becomes something like: “datacenters are evil and are a symbol of techno fascist distopia! If they build a datacenter in my city, the taps will run dry and Elon Musk will use it to make ai porn of my children!” Even if it’s a small solar powered closed loop that provides VPS, storage and web hosting for nerds and small businesses.
I also do think there’s also a scale of evil there. Some environmental impacts are not immediately obvious and might not be known about during planning. Some were built a long time ago with older tech and are a bit shitty but have a plan to transition to be more sustainable, etc.
The world is full of “alright but a little bit shit.” It’s not all perfect angels and mustache twirling villains.
I don’t want to detract too much from the real villains though. Nobody needs a 9GW datacity for military ai.
- TechLich@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
I mean they’re not all for AI and they’re not all environmentally devastating.
This one very much is.
- TechLich@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
There are quite a few. The best ones are sustainable closed loop datacenters with on-site solar which is becoming pretty common across the world, especially for new builds. Often producing more power than they need and feeding it back to the grid (especially if the local government has an energy buy back scheme).
But most data centers are pretty tiny and just built into an office building with a bunch of server racks.
Depending on where you live, a quick web search for data centers in your local area will probably show up dozens of them of varying quality hosting people’s websites and business apps etc. They aren’t any scarier than anything else you find in a city. They’re critical infrastructure that helps make the internet a thing. In most cases, if it wasn’t a datacenter, it would be a car yard or a factory, etc.
But! There are also truly evil datacenters. Like this insane Utah monstrosity built for a shitty purpose and the size of a freaking city. An obscene monument to the US tech cesspool’s hubris.
- nomadman@piefed.socialEnglish2 days
It would be a shame if the builders had to restart their work every day…
- 2 days
Good luck. The data center is classified as a national security site and has the Utah Test and Training Range base nearby.
They’re building it with the intention of military security.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
intention to be used with Palantir, google, MS for mass surveillance and by israel.
