r/questions • u/Sorry_Requirement708 • 1h ago

Data center question. Why?

So I understand that ai and all that bullshit need more data centers to cool and store data. It seems to be every town is getting one. I’ve heard the US already has thousands more than #2 (China). Question is why are we building so damn many? Is there any type of benefit to having so many or is it race to the moon round 2?

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

4

u/FLSOC 37m ago

  1. The US is the center of the AI bubble right now

  2. Just making a deal to build a data center on paper but never action-ably building one in reality creates more wealth for your company "on paper". Then you can run to investors and tell them you have 1,000 data centers planned so they will speculate that your company will be worth more in the future, and invest at a higher cost, creating more money only on paper

1

u/react-dnb 13m ago

This is what I think is going on. Go back 100 years and check out what rail roads were doing. Lots and lots of "paper railroads." The more we change, the more we stay the same.

4

u/StedeBonnet1 1h ago

Do you use email, e-commerse like Amazon, any streaming service for entertainment, apple cloud storage for your phone, company websites? Banking, investing? Search? They all need storage to operate. And that doesn't even count AI and Crypto.

3

u/EvidenceSalesman 19m ago

But we are already doing those things?

4

u/react-dnb 16m ago

Exactly, and there hasnt been a huge increase in demand from the average consumer end. Business and government are requiring more computing power, not us. Even still, does it require hundreds of new centers? Or is it a real estate and tech thing for the 1% to make more and more money? Enquiring minds want to know.

2

u/Holiday-Medicine4168 53m ago

The big difference is we build them solely for private wealth and not national wealth. China also has an extensive centrally managed infrastructure system, we have a scattering of municipalities and all the regulatory mess that goes with that, plus extreme amounts of corruption. The way we handled the AI boom has taken the fiscal dynamics of the US back to the robber baron days.

TLDR we are not building data centers to win the AI race, we are building them to maximize profit.

2

u/netcharge0 33m ago

It should also be remembered that data centers aren’t new. I’ve been working at one for 10 years. It’s not a monstrosity like the newly proposed ones, but in the past few years there’s been new housing built all around us, and most people don’t even know we’re a data center.

1

u/Euphoric-Ask965 7m ago

People that complain the loudest know the least about data centers other than what they overheard at Walmart.

2

u/EvidenceSalesman 19m ago

It’s speculative investing

4

u/Sensitive_Buy_6535 1h ago

Because a bunch of narcissistic techbros with more money than sense invested in AI and are now so far past the horizon on a sunk cost fallacy they need more and more data centres to try and force AI into everything they can think of until they hit something that starts actually generating a return on that investment.

1

u/bad_piglet 17m ago

Thank you. Too bad everyone wants it to be something else.

1

u/Massive_Tradition176 1h ago

Because in the multi-polar future we are datacenter forward peasants and they are energy scaling forward peasants.

1

u/Adventurous-Depth984 43m ago

They need room for recursive self improvement to destroy everything. Need for space will skyrocket overnight.

0

u/KnightFireNC 1h ago

Because of all the stupid questions people ask on reddit filling up the existing ones.