• Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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      1 month ago

      These are not AI data centers - two very different things.

      A traditional data center is largely a data storage facility with service-hosting/data processing capability.

      An AI data center is built with a focus on maximizing processing performance per sq ft.

      Nearly all traditional data centers probably can’t even get a significant increase in power to upgrade to significant AI capability.

      As I said elsewhere, there are roughly 3x as many McD’s as data centers, so for every 3 McD’s you pass means one DC.

      DC’s are everywhere - the basement of a large office building, in the central core of a single-floor large building, etc.

      I’ve worked for/with small companies that had DC’s rooms in their building, because they had sufficient power capability and cooling was trivial to reconfigure/upgrade.

      When people use online backup services (e.g. CrashPlan, Backblaze, etc), or running their own web server/VPS, it’s in these kinds of generic data centers (though I’m sure CrashPlan and Backblaze have some very large DCs, the concept is the same - it’s largely about storage capability which is a very different power and cooling profile than AI).