Meta is building several gigawatt-sized data centers to power AI, as reported by Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" to accomplish this feat, with an aim of creating "superintelligence." The term typically refers to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence across multiple domains. This is something of a holy grail for Silicon Valley tech types.
The first center is called Prometheus and it comes online next year. It's being built in Ohio. Next up, there's a data center called Hyperion that's almost the size of Manhattan. This one should "be able to scale up to 5GW over several years." Some of these campuses will be among the largest in the world, as most data centers can only generate hundreds of megawatts of capacity.
Meta has also been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind and others. Scale AI's co-founder Alexandr Wang is heading up this effort.
However, these giant data centers do not exist in a vacuum. The complexes typically brush up against local communities. The centers are not only power hogs, but also water hogs. The New York Times just published a report on how Meta data centers impact local water supplies.
There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.
Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. The new centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times. Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
This same worrying story is playing out across the country. Data center hot spots in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are also taxing local water reserves. For instance, some Phoenix homebuilders have been forced to pause new constructions due to droughts exacerbated by these data centers.
It's super cool when they decide to build these fucking things in water scarce actual deserts in the Southwestern US. I'm aware of a handful of these projects currently being proposed - and the one nearest to where I live is being proposed to use "reclaimed waste water"....after the initial 3-4 years after the data center is up and running. They need time to build the reclaimed water infrastructure you see, and they can't just leave the data center turned off until then. No, they need 3-4 years of scarce drinking water so they can be up and running generating a profit, and then in half a decade to a decade they'll totally get that reclaimed waste water infrastructure in place to make sure it runs 100% on stinky water.
This totally wont be a rug pull or anything. There's no way these massive silicone valley companies would do something like that!
They (company, sycophantic politicians) sell it on the idea of bringing jobs to the city they'll be placed in, but these places, while huge land wise, will only employ 100-190 people and I am doubtful of it ever being the high estimate. Even if it was, that's like no jobs! Every angle of this is so fucking stupid.
Asking cities of hundreds of thousands of residents to give up their drinking water, during a time of fucking water scarcity, to employee 3 and half Arbys franchises worth of people is so goddamm shortsighted.