Well said. It reminds me of the peak of crypto hype, but worse and more pervasive. There's this attitude that no matter what the problem is, the solution MUST be LLMs.
They don't need to be built in the middle of downtown freaking Seattle, though.
I think the point people are making is that this claim is not self-evident, and there's a remarkable lack of justification for it whenever it gets asserted. If you're convinced that this tool can literally solve every problem we have in society, it would help to explain why you're so confident about that. So far all I've heard ever is "exponential growth", which is not particularly convincing when a high school precalculus class gives you enough knowledge to be able to understand that there are curves that look a lot like exponentials before suddenly hitting diminishing returns.
If I was more tin-foil-hat inclined, I'd hypothesize that this wave of anti-datacenter activism is an astroturfing campaign pushed by the CCP to make sure the US deliberately refuses to compete with China in the technology sector. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by incumbent tech companies to block competition via regulatory capture and grandfathering. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by the agricultural sector (and/or companies like Nestlé) to deflect attention from their multiple-orders-of-magnitude greater water consumption. The reality's probably a lot less exciting, though: just a bunch of people who mean well and are rightfully opposed to Big Tech capitalism, but have been misled (probably by some or all of the above) into throwing out the babies with their bathwater.
I'm glad you're not tinfoil-hat inclined!
But we're being sold a vision of putting them in low-earth orbit. That means, among other things:
- They don't need to be situated anywhere near their customers
- They don't need a lot of employees to babysit the hardware, or in fact any at all
- They don't need water. Radiative cooling is evidently just fine by itself, even without convection or conduction
- They don't need any networking infrastructure beyond what satellite IP links can provide
- They don't need anything but localized photovoltaic power
Every argument for putting data centers in space applies equally to putting them literally anywhere on Earth.
In any case:
>They don't need to be situated anywhere near their customers
They are situated “near” their customers… assuming those customers are also Starlink customers. That's really the only remotely-decent reason (IMO) to put datacenters in orbit: to fulfill the same role for space-based customers (including satellite Internet users) that “edge” datacenters do for geographically-local customers.
Here in Nevada, NV Energy's in the process of getting state PUC approval for datacenter-specific “large-load electrical service agreements” specifically to ensure datacenters foot the bill for the infrastructure and generation buildouts needed to support them. Hopefully it goes through, since that seems to me like the exact right way to go about it.