Power-hungry data centers run hot, so one Chinese company is planning to submerge a pod of servers in the sea off Shanghai with hopes of solving computing's energy woes. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/04/tech/china-underwater-data-centers/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #tech #china #datacenters #oceans #energy
Data centers in space? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says it's possible in the next 10 to 20 years. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/04/tech/bezos-data-centers-outer-space/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #tech #jeffbezos #datacenters #space #ai
The staggering investments in artificial intelligence keep coming. But how are the enormous sums possible when the returns on investments, at least for now, pale in comparison? https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/03/tech/ai-investment-craze/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #tech #ai #investments #datacenters
@mediapart BTW, la présentation de rapport est aujourd'hui, live sur youtube: https://theshiftproject.org/evenements/presentation-du-rapport-final-intelligence-artificielle/ "Quelles trajectoires énergie-carbone sont en train d’être impulsées par les filières des centres de données et de la capacité de calcul ? Quels en sont les futurs physiquement réalisables, compatibles avec la contrainte énergie- #carbone ?" 1/2
@mediapart 2/2 ici le rapport en pdf "Intelligence artificielle, données, calculs" : quelles infrastructures dans un monde décarboné ? https://theshiftproject.org/app/uploads/2025/09/RF-PIA-1.pdf
#datacenters #IA #LLM #carbonFootprint #energie #CO2 #electricity #electricite
#Écologie 🌱 IA: un rapport alerte sur le risque de conflit d’usage de l’électricité
Les projets de centres de données numériques sont si nombreux et si énormes que leur consommation d’électricité pourrait être multipliée par quatre d’ici dix ans en France, selon un rapport du Shift Project. Au risque de menacer la décarbonation des transports et de l’industrie.
Par Jade Lindgaard › https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/ecologie/011025/ia-un-rapport-alerte-sur-le-risque-de-conflit-d-usage-de-l-electricite?at_medium=rs-cm&at_campaign=mastodon&at_account=mediapart
@mediapart BTW, la présentation de rapport est aujourd'hui, live sur youtube: https://theshiftproject.org/evenements/presentation-du-rapport-final-intelligence-artificielle/ "Quelles trajectoires énergie-carbone sont en train d’être impulsées par les filières des centres de données et de la capacité de calcul ? Quels en sont les futurs physiquement réalisables, compatibles avec la contrainte énergie- #carbone ?" 1/2
⚡ Researchers Just Found Something Extremely Alarming About AI's Power Usage
｢ As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly ｣
https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-power-usage-text-to-video-generator
@jbz Well, the headline is worst clickbait: we should not forget that other uses of #AI may show also nonlinear increases and the increase of energy use in AI #datacenters is already climate-killing high. (And that's beside the waste of drinking water.)
KKR says Japan’s aging population presents opportunities to invest in areas that tap artificial intelligence and other technologies to make the most of a shrinking workforce. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/09/26/companies/aging-japan-will-fuel-ai-tech-investment/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #companies #ai #investments #datacenters #kkr
Jonathan Schofield
boosted
"Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website" https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability (JavaScript pay-wall). Archive : https://archive.ph/jlHRt #climatecrisis #aihype #datacenters #capitalism#Google
"Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website" https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability (JavaScript pay-wall). Archive : https://archive.ph/jlHRt #climatecrisis #aihype #datacenters #capitalism#Google
La Tunisie, quant à elle, ne compte que 4 datacenters.
Datacenters : Quatre pays concentrent 46 % des installations opérationnelles en Afrique
STOP OCCUPATION 🍉 S. Costa
boosted
How the AI hype is pushing up emissions -- even if it never delivers.
https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/the-real-problem-with-AI/
Tim Chambers
boosted
Amid rising #electric #bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household & business ratepayers from the costs of feeding #BigTech’s #energy hungry #DataCenters.
It’s not clear that any state has a solution & the actual effect of data centers on #electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against #tech behemoths like #Microsoft, #Google, #Amazon & #Meta.
More than a dozen states have begun taking steps as #DataCenters drive a rapid build-out of #PowerPlants & transmission lines.
That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest #power #grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on #electricity #bills or pushing #DataCenter owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.
Rising #power #bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.”
More than a dozen states have begun taking steps as #DataCenters drive a rapid build-out of #PowerPlants & transmission lines.
That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest #power #grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on #electricity #bills or pushing #DataCenter owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.
Amid rising #electric #bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household & business ratepayers from the costs of feeding #BigTech’s #energy hungry #DataCenters.
It’s not clear that any state has a solution & the actual effect of data centers on #electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against #tech behemoths like #Microsoft, #Google, #Amazon & #Meta.
I don't know much about modern data centres, beyond a basic understanding of server hardware. Their penchant for water usage for because of cooling, right?
If cost were not an issue, how bad for the environment would an LLM prompt still be if fulfilled by data centre that is powered exclusively by solar/wind power, and cooled with closed-loop cooling?
8 Things to Know About New Research on Earth’s Rapid Drying and the Loss of Its Groundwater
—
Decades of NASA satellite data reveal how quickly the planet’s underground stores of fresh water have been depleted and how their use is contributing to rising sea levels. Here are the key takeaways.
https://www.propublica.org/article/groundwater-fresh-water-depletion-research-science-advances-takeaways?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #Science#Climate#Environment#ClimateChange#Water#NASA#Data
@ProPublica And now we add the crazy water waste of data centres, especially for AI ... https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/
Joachim
boosted
"New servers are less energy-intensive." Really? 🤔
This is said so often that it could almost be taken as an absolute truth.
By extension, it is often said that each new generation of hardware consumes less energy than the previous one.
Manufacturers communicate pretty often about this, including HPE (1), Nvidia (2), etc..
A 🧵
"New servers are less energy-intensive." Really? 🤔
This is said so often that it could almost be taken as an absolute truth.
By extension, it is often said that each new generation of hardware consumes less energy than the previous one.
Manufacturers communicate pretty often about this, including HPE (1), Nvidia (2), etc..
A 🧵
It's odd to me that people talk about data centers in terms of megawatts, a measure of electric power. For one example among many, a Bloomberg article from March about Microsoft cancelling data center plans began:
Microsoft Corp. has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence."Data center projects that...amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity" is a nonsensical statement. The (technical) capacities of a data center have to do with storage, compute, transmission, and latency. I understand there's probably some Fermi calculation along the lines of converting electric power to compute capacity using the TDP of NVIDIA's latest GPUs or something like that. Nevertheless, it's misleading to speak this way, not to mention lazy. It is oversimplifying in a bad way, treating data centers as utilities that supply a commodity when that is just not the case (at least not with AI, where prices for services still fluctuate fairly wildly).
#dev #tech #AI #energy #power #DataCenters