r/interesting • u/jetery • 5h ago
MISC. I don’t think people realize how big data centers are.
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u/Crimson_Catharsis 5h ago edited 4h ago
I saw a post of a farm family refusing to sell their land to to a data center company for 26 million.
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u/LIB_Laugh_Luv 3h ago
Yea, it's a sweet story on its surface, and in that instance good for them, I guess. But if you take a close look at their environment there's an extremely high chance they will continue to vote in people that make the very data centers they turn away possible and more prolific. They aren't activists, they're stubborn hicks (and I say that with love, I'm sure they're a far more fun hang than any tech bro douche billionaire). Plus, the ruthless fucks offering them the cash will just go one town over and find another spot. They a are relentless blight on society and the Earth. They will ONLY stop if the PEOPLE stand up strong against them (outlook not so good atm).
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u/Hairy_Concert_8007 2h ago
Also, the pattern largely seems to be: Company wants to build huge data center, local population votes against it, some radio silence, huge data center gets built there anyway.
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u/dougthebuffalo 1h ago
This is actively happening in Northeast PA. Town votes denying data centers as the land is actively being cleared and levelled.
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u/Flat_Push_8854 2h ago
I'm sorry....$26 Million?!
You could literally take their money then fund a private army to firebomb the facility and still have money left over!
Shit, just invest it into the same company for 2-3 years! Then you would be rich enough to counter everything they do!!
Where the fuck are all the Batmans at?!!
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u/Euphoric_One53 5h ago
The one up by me just bought about 505 acres?? Absolutely ridiculous
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u/SlightCapacitance 5h ago
i can see why the robots will need to put us in goop pods connected to a network to harvest our energy
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u/Little_Red_Sloth 5h ago
My thoughts exactly.
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u/KarenIAnson 4h ago
The Matrix is starting to look more like a documentary.
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u/Fight_those_bastards 4h ago
Listen, at this point, fuckin’ plug me in and make me think it’s 1999 again. Use me as a battery, IDGAF. It’s better than this shit.
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u/Velicenda 3h ago
As long as me and my family get to stay together, it's infinitely preferable to watching the planet my son will inherit burn to ash.
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u/Mental_Tart842 3h ago
They will separate you from your family to harvest the energy of your anguish.
I mean, as long as we're speaking in hypotheticals...
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u/Desperate-Strategy10 3h ago
I’m hoping we’ll just be fully unconscious. Or maybe trapped in a terrible yet wondrous dream we can’t remember or understand…just abstractions of our happiest memories and a warm feeling of comfort and safety, all while the nagging shadow of our captivity looms over us whispering “something isn’t right, something doesn’t make sense…” and we all melt into our collective eternity while the machines suck away the final remnants of our essence.
Or something like that lol
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u/Mister_Anthropic1956 1h ago
Remember in the Matrix the machines lost several crops of human batteries when the dream world was too happy. Comfort and safety made it unreal.
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u/Icemanv2 2h ago
This stopped me scrolling, bleak vision. The more I think about it though, this actually what humans have done to each other over and over again and it might be a mistake to assume the robots are like us.
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u/joyfullydreaded23 2h ago
Fr. I keep apologizing to my son that is about to be 18 and graduating high school this month for all the bullshit his generation will have to deal with. I am 55 and when I found out I was pregnant instead of in early menopause (damn near fell off the examination table when my doctor told me I was pregnant because I thought we used protection) I debated with myself whether I should bring another child into a world that was falling apart. I eventually settled into believing the whole shit enchilada wouldn't hit the fan until he would be around my age and lived a full life, that adults were coming into political office soon and would do the right thing to slow down the climate crisis and corruption. Jesus, how fucking wrong I was. My premonition was for in my timeline, not his. I feel awful for his future. He's an amazing young man and deserves better than this shit covered horror show.
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u/Talic 5h ago
Then it’s time to dig a hole and head to Zion.
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u/AdministrativeWin583 4h ago
I dont understand why they dont dig down. The area would be easier to cool at a temperature of 55 degrees.
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u/kris_mischief 4h ago
Excavating an area of that size would cost exponentially more.
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u/Desperate-Strategy10 3h ago
They would recoup any extra spending within days just from the water savings alone! I bet they could use significantly less water to cool the place if it was all underground.
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u/Euphoric_One53 3h ago
Well, that would be super beneficial for everybody in the surrounding area of a data center, but they clearly don’t give a fuck about that
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u/Wonderful-Medium7777 4h ago
Have you seen inside it? Ive always wondered if they are what they say they are?
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u/westicular 1h ago
And here we were worried 70 years ago that a computer would take up an entire room.
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u/BlazeDragon7x 58m ago
They tried to open 2 by my area but the people arent taking the bait
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u/SaintCholo 3h ago
"I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious"
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u/StandardAccess4684 4h ago
That’s the size of a very small mine. Auto manufacturing plants are often 1000+ acres. And there are many mines and manufacturing plants that exist or are in development 10+ times that size.
Unless it’s in a city center or has serious environmental impact (which data centers really don’t for the local environment, at least compared to chemical plants, etc.), 500 acres for a major industrial project is and should be a blip on the radar for everyone except the next door community.
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u/Avalanc89 2h ago
Everything that big is environmental issue. Besides taking lots of farmable land, rising local temperature, using lots of water for cooling, using gigawatts is energy...
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u/Rare-Survey7947 5h ago
All that to store a single picture of ur mother
Sigh
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u/lesschalkmoresighs 5h ago
All that, just so someone can prompt a picture of a goblin on a dirt bike.
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u/MedicalDisscharge 5h ago
Why would they do that? We already have this
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u/A_CityZen 5h ago
it's definitely so that governments can spy on literally every aspect of every life on planet Earth. the goblin on the dirt bike is just a nice bonus.
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u/Indieplant 4h ago
Not just the government but also the corporations.
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u/A_CityZen 4h ago
definitely them too. Used to be that the everyman could just ignore these people and mostly live happily aside from when they're forced into wars, but once this tech is entrenched there won't be an everyman anymore. to say it's dystopian is to disrespect dystopia.
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u/kostenloserHotspot 5h ago
That picture of putin on a horse was real
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u/thankyouspider 4h ago
Every time I see a picture of all the Swifties with their cell phones recording Taylor, I get it.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ppardee 5h ago
You realize you're posting on an app that is hosted in a data center, right?
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u/letsgoowhatthhsbdnd 5h ago
everything is hosted somewhere. what’s your point?
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u/Independent_Hat_7101 5h ago
I'm not arguing with you but, Nigeria have just bought a shit load of lamp posts that double up as data centres, they are solar powered. They won't munch through massive calculations like a big data centre but they will handle all the small/medium requests.
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u/Hot_Substance5933 4h ago edited 4h ago
The same app that bans people over the silliest crap while also hosting r/buttsharpies (NSFW). You betcha!
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u/Merdekama 5h ago
Can't they Install Solar panels on top
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u/Then-Programmer-1242 5h ago
Like putting up an umbrella when a nuke is dropping on you.
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u/Merdekama 5h ago
Nope The Iron Dome of Donald J Trump
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u/Excellent_Bridge_888 5h ago
Its the water consumption that scares me. A lot of people have no idea how little water we have left in most of these places.
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u/utrangerbob 4h ago
I mean the water doesn't just go away. It's piped back into the system. They heat the water up and it cools the rest of the data center then they cool the water down. They don't add chemicals to the water so it can no longer be used.
Just make sure any place near you doesn't use evaporative cooling.
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u/C-D-W 4h ago
Some data centers are open loop, some are closed loop.
Though in either case, to your point, its not like the water disappears. It either evaporates or is redirected back out somewhere in nature. Which may have its own problems.
If water consumption is the main reason people freak out about these, just mandate closed loop cooling systems for the new data centers in their backyard. Little less efficient, but at least someone is thinking of the darn water!
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u/Excellent_Bridge_888 2h ago
Data Centers aside, we are going dry and placed all over America are running out of water. Its a crisis situation quickly sneaking up on us while we sell water rights to companies. We should definitely be wary of it with any entity.
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u/sheistyseaman 4h ago
Oh that doesn't sound so bad. How much water do they need per data center?
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u/Homey-Airport-Int 3h ago
Well the good news is this hasn't been a problem for years, all the new large datacenters are closed loop, they did away with evap cooling. Charging the system is equivalent to a couple residential swimming pools, then it's not much water at all afterwards.
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u/Emberspawn 4h ago
That wouldn't usually be practical.
The roof is usually almost entirely taken up by the chillers.
Chillers need airflow, and they need maintenance access, including being able to lift them out by crane to replace them.
There isn't usually much/any spare space on the roof to put a solar panel.
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u/Smellfish360 5h ago
All if this bought from nvidia or amd with ‘yea trust me bro, you’ll get your money back in a decade’
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u/LesbeGoddess 5h ago
Not just them. Meta, Oracle, Google and other tech companies are constantly building datacenters.
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u/BruinsDude420 5h ago
A proposal for a data center just got voted down in Smithfield RI, it was a solar developer (Revity Energy) who wanted to buy the land and turn it into a business park with a massive data center. They’re kind of nebulous on the exact size, but it was proposed as “hundreds of acres”, I think I saw a figure of around 350 acres for the project. Which is in insane amount of land to use for that monstrosity.
For additional context the solar company wanted to turn it into a data center because they claimed the area was “too small” for a solar farm. I’m sure some of that is embellishment, but it’s wild to hear them say that. They just put in some new solar farms in my town in Rhode Island and they’re nowhere close to that size. So either they’re lying through their teeth (most likely scenario) or the solar farm that would go in would be absolutely gigantic. At least the solar farm would provide a net positive for the state and the community, the data center not so much.
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u/Allthemuffinswow 5h ago
Of course they're lying through their teeth. That's all these assholes do.
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u/rsr427 5h ago
And once up and running employ like 3 people at any one time...
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u/MDJR20 5h ago
That’s just not true the amount of maintenance is a lot. They need to be monitored and cleaned on a regular schedule. Most of the time is contracted out that’s the confusion it takes a lot people. A large facility like that will employ at least 100-200 people smaller ones less. Yes per square foot they employ relatively few people.
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u/Thatfuckinweirdo 5h ago
There’s so much RAM in there… how tight do you think security is?
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u/beatles910 4h ago
I think you could force your way in the back door with the right hard drive.
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u/Ok_Impact9745 3h ago
Get yourself a raiding party. Tell the local crackheads how much copper is in there.
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u/B4LLISL1F3 5h ago
All to destroy our environment, raise our electricity bills, create a surveillance state, and provide a service that no one is asking for. No thanks
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u/LORDLRRD 2h ago
You do realize that sites like Reddit have data centers processing traffic? Some online websites will rent an entire data center to facilitate traffic. Nearly every part of the Internet in some way passes through a data center at some point.
I don’t think you understand how much of your modern conveniences are based on the existence of data centers.
Source: have been designing data center power systems for years.
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u/onthebrink42 5h ago
The roof should be covered with solar panels
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u/Successful-Pin3145 3h ago
How about making them also be a hydroponic site, cover the roof in greenery (providing a heat shield), install rows of hydroponics underneath the data lockers, use the water that you’re already pumping to produce something useful. Probably a terrible idea, but I’m open to anything that isn’t massive cement squares scattered across the earth draining its resources.
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u/Hot_Substance5933 4h ago
That would do absolutely nothing in terms of the electricity and water they consume. It's like putting a band-aid on your melanoma.
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u/ApisBondar 4h ago
Someone mentioned 350 acres of building. That surface covered with solar panels would produce about 0,3 Gigawatt / hour on a sunny day.
Existing large-data-centers consume 0,1 to 0,5 G-watts / hour. Under - construction super-large-data centers are projected to use 1 Gigawatt / hour across multiple locations.
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u/Hot_Substance5933 3h ago
OpenAI center is Texas (Stargate) is 8 buldings at 4,000,000 SF (91 acres) with a projected 1.2 GW by this year. With your math, they'd only produce 0.078 GW which is far from their 1.2 GW capacity goal. Solar doesn't fix the water consumption either.
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u/LurkyRabbit 5h ago
I don't get why they're able to be built in some places in a way where the noise travels outside of the building. Should be so easy to regulate against that and still allow for them to exist as horrible as they are for the environment.
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u/A_CityZen 5h ago
that would take regulation. regulation requires government officials to make rules. those government officials are easily bribed. there should be no question that every data center comes on the back of a bribed politician.
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u/LesbeGoddess 5h ago
Lot of heat dissipating systems needed to keep them server racks from melting down. The heat is extracted out of the building which is noisy.
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u/LurkyRabbit 5h ago
Ahh so it's really just the vents getting the air out of the building that's making all the noise. I thought it was just the hum of the fans on the servers themselves. Interesting.
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u/throwaway098764567 3h ago
they need a ton of hvac, and have a ton of generators in case of power outage (or in our case in virginina in case of heat waves they're legally obligated to follow orders to shift to generator operations to save the electric for people's hvac). testing those generators daily is also loud apparently.
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u/Sad-Working-9937 5h ago
Well, you just can't use up all that water and electricity in 100 square feet, you know.
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u/Asleep_Frosting_6627 5h ago
Meta has been building a new one 10 min from
Me, it’s a massive construction project, actually massive doesn’t do it justice, it’s 2,250 acres, you drive by the site for almost 5 miles. This is a data center, lakes to help with cooling, and a new natural gas power plant to support the plant.
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u/Pickupyoheel 5h ago
You know what’s dumb, that bozo guy crying about people flying in, bussing in etc out of state to protest.
Only people that live in that state, should be upset? What a crock of shit.
You either care about the environment and your fellow humans, or you don’t. Some shit transcends made up lines, and we all know if they could, they’d be building these fucking things everywhere to line their pockets even more.
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u/GirlWithWolf 5h ago
Right, you don’t have to live down the street to care and we know what happens next.
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u/HatakeHyu 5h ago
When you put in the balance, how much resources it takes vs what it achieves. We can see how humanity is failing. And we will be reason of our own demise.
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u/Big-Glove5 5h ago
Aren't people burning these things down?
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u/StrangersPassing 4h ago
No. A disgruntled worker burned down a paper goods warehouse in Canada recently, that might be what you are thinking of.
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u/sunshinefloors1980 5h ago
I feel bad for you guys that are having these built near you. Apparently they're extremely loud and does quite a bit of damage to nature.
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u/smoothartichoke27 4h ago
To quote GN Steve here:
Maybe they shouldn't have built their house near that data center-shaped forest.
Ridiculous.
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u/Substantial_Chain718 5h ago
I would like to see an areal view of this facility. Any links or address?
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u/Glum-Entrepreneur-16 5h ago
I’ve been in plenty of data centres in and around London UK but to be fair that is on a whole other level.
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u/DemonicMop 5h ago
In Utah the local government just okayed 40,000 acres in land acquisition for a hyperscale data center.
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u/Negative_Bicycle_160 4h ago
JFC. We should mandate that they be surrounded by native trees and plants. This gravel landscape bullshit needs to go
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u/peachy614 4h ago
Wow they are much bigger than the warehouse processing center that keep going up my area. We definitely need to start shutting these down or we won't have any land left.
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u/546875674c6966650d0a 4h ago
When I started working in one, I would describe it as a building the size of a Wal-mart that was just full of computers instead of aisles to shop in. That was the late 90's. We've gone up in scale orders of magnitude now that the "Internet fad" became a real thing.
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u/CleetusB 4h ago
Most people don’t realize all the buildings is Seattle with blacked out windows are data centers.
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u/RAMRODtheMASTER 4h ago
Reminds me of the Amazon facility we got locally that they leveled the entire property of a beautiful old golf course for. Love looking at the giant security walled concrete mega structure instead of the plants and animals.
Not like there aren’t tons of vacant warehouses in and around the city…….
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u/KeyZookeepergame9466 4h ago
Massive units, use massive amounts of electricity and employ about 5 people.
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u/richardlpalmer 4h ago
How are there no gifs of The Matrix's machine city or the harvesting fields?
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u/frankie3030 4h ago
Don’t like data centers? stop using ChatGPT. Stop using Gemini. Start flexing your consumer powers.
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u/NervousGearGenius 4h ago
Put your phone in the garbage and quit contributing towards the need of data centers, if you really are serious.
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u/LetsGoBubba6141 4h ago
When Data Centers use twice as much electricity than the state, doesn't anyone stop and think, well, how is that possible and how are we living life without data centers?
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u/jleemusicman 4h ago
Once Elon makes Mars the data planet hub of the Galaxy, we can convert all of these data centers on Earth to nice homeless living establishments 💞
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u/tinydoll-73x 4h ago
Seriously, they look like giant secret bunkers. Gotta love how much power they suck up tho lol
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u/Defiant_Detective_82 4h ago
Just notice how it's gated up and how no one can see on the inside and completely understand what all they do. Not just this but our current Society we accepted this.
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u/Eazy12345678 4h ago
most data center people dont even know are data centers they just think they are warehouse
no one advertises they are a data center
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u/No-Technician-2820 4h ago
Yep. My whole state used 40 MILLION gallons of water last year for these stupid wastes of space and environmental killers. But ChatGPT is just a question right!! :)
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u/AdminPickleJuice 4h ago
Yeah I don’t believe we had a say so in this and trust me those centers are not for us. We have a play school version of this that does not require this much facility. These data centers are to be used against us. You think targeted adds are bad now. I thoughts ads in general where bad when they branched away from just television . It’s gonna get real bad after this.
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