So they’re trying to burn out workers, energy production and the AI bubble all at the same time?
Google keeps building tons of these ugly data centers that look like copies of Langley. Gone are the days where theres a quirky Bayside campus with fun colors and slides and shit.
These things are already disastrous. Theyre put in outskirts of medium cities and do not take any planning into consideration. These facilities employ well over a 1000 people in places with no transit. I drove past one on a workday morning on a road trip and the only way in was a single left turn lane across a state highway. Not a single aspect of AI crap has any essence of humanity considered. Just reckless, vapid nonsense.
What? Data centers employ barely anyone. They are hotels for computers. Most staff on site are security guards. Otherwise there is a rotating skeleton crew of people who unrack and rerack servers.
The whole goal is to have as little cost as possible and just make money from powered silicon.
I think youre gravely underestimating the human power it takes to keep facilities like this running. They wouldn’t be building acres of parking lot into them with multiple armed security lanes if they weren’t necessary for the amount of people that work there.
Not to give these companies any credit as “job creators” because the amount of jobs they “create” for the amount of land and resources theyre wasting is net negative ten thousand times over.
For the ultra large ones. Yes. Because they are also business campuses. Most of the data centers being built are not $1B+ projects. Most of them are $200M projects and they are nothing except hotels for computers. When they have a single owner, like an Amazon or a Google, they follow a single homogenous operating model that is driven by a single corporate team focused on growing footprint globally, which means not needing thousands of employees in every single location as that would be unsustainable.
all i have to do to become a millionaire is double my money 10 times, how hard could it be?
If I do that, I’d be rivaling the national debt lol
I don’t know about the personal ideology of the average ars technica reader, but I am thrilled at the anger in the comment section and how their sentiments mirror those here
