Joe Brockmeier21h ago

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116334729524665446

I'm just a touch skeptical about the claims here. I can believe that large data centers may raise temperatures around them, but the claim about raising nearby temperatures up to 16.4F and that the changes could be felt up to 3.3 miles away.

To be clear, I'm not questioning the concept that data centers may raise temperatures -- I'm just a bit skeptical about the, no pun intended, degree of the changes.

However, I do think we should be hard applying the brakes on building new data centers, etc., to study their environmental impacts before just blindly building out more.

Show threadWulfy—Speaker to the machines

@jzb

Every time I actually fact checked these "WAAAH DATACENTRES" actual numbers, and I've done this three times already, this is what I found;

1. The numbers include estimates of future loads

2. The numbers purposefully conflate the #Ai #datacenters with the existing Datacentres, "the cloud" your #AWS , Facebook, Dropbox, Netflix, iCloud etc and yes your #Mastodon servers. Which at the last check is about 50/50 but it's hard to get real data.

3. The water consumption is very poorly presented often conflating water use with water destruction

4. The numbers often pick a comparison that sounds terrible but in the global scale is fuck all.
Like "AI uses as much water as the city of New York!!!!!!!!!!"

Having said that the trend of #broligarchs just slapping down methane emergency generators on the perimeter running 24/7 is just criminal.

TLDR; The "WAAAH DATACENTRES" "journalism" really depends on the personal bias of the author

Apr 2 at 3:42pmWeb