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ksec 10 minutes ago [-]
I wrote below in 2022 on HN [1] when everyone was panicking about AWS growth slowing down.
* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
AmazingEveryDay 4 hours ago [-]
All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
tengbretson 37 minutes ago [-]
In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?
doctorwho42 7 minutes ago [-]
The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them.
Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...
And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
halestock 27 minutes ago [-]
Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.
protocolture 53 minutes ago [-]
Amazons business is just cloud services tbh. I dont know what Amazons customer base looks like in aggregate but I bet its more interesting than just ads.
tdb7893 2 hours ago [-]
It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!
laughing_man 27 minutes ago [-]
That's what pays the bills. You wouldn't expect someone to spend this kind of money without a way to make it back (and then some).
Arainach 21 minutes ago [-]
Most of the tech startup ecosystem for the last 20 years has been spending crazy money without a clear plan for how to make it back.
kylehotchkiss 29 minutes ago [-]
Or generate political slops to rile up older people
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat
ares623 2 hours ago [-]
Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.
user3939382 1 hours ago [-]
Tell that to São Paulo.
jrflowers 52 minutes ago [-]
Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!
kibwen 2 hours ago [-]
Frankly, it should be a crime, a felony even, to purchase something if you haven't seen an ad for it beforehand. Think of the poor middlemen!
ddxv 1 hours ago [-]
Unpopular take I know. But ads are a source of revenue for much of the free and open internet. The alternatives are paid features that are a regressive tax on poorer people who can't afford them or fork up larger amounts of their discretionary budget.
While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.
Gigachad 60 minutes ago [-]
Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.
We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.
graphime 3 hours ago [-]
> it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good
Perhaps voice your concern with your elected government representative?
Unless of course, you think your effort is useless.
brunoborges 21 minutes ago [-]
> But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
If only...
I do believe that access to commercial AI should be regulated, heavily taxed, and controlled just as much as access to dangerous chemicals and weapons. Only this way the best AI models are more likely to indeed be used for frugal purposes (sadly, however, including ads).
weird-eye-issue 18 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't that just incentivize more consumption of models that fall outside of the jurisdiction of whatever you are proposing would be in charge of taxing these so-called best AI models?
brunoborges 10 minutes ago [-]
If you get caught with illegal guns and illegal chemicals, well... there are consequences. Bad actors will always find a way, at the risk of getting caught.
However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
wincy 2 hours ago [-]
So what does one of these full time data center jobs look like, day to day? If I’m a software engineer I feel like I’d have to move and get a pay decrease to actually work at one of these? I mean until AI finally puts me out of a job. I guess I wouldn’t really be qualified to work one of these jobs?
protocolture 50 minutes ago [-]
The blokes I meet who work 8x5 from a data center tend to spend their days installing hardware, deinstalling hardware, providing remote hands (usually cabling, sometimes console access)building racks, managing power supplies and maintaining asset registers. And escorting idiots like me around when things get technical.
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though? Anyway amazon already has plenty of those in house.
Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though?
It would be rather silly is a multi-billion dollar investment went down because, for some reason, admins couldn't remote in.
jubilanti 54 minutes ago [-]
That's startup to mid sized traditional company thinking. Not at the hyperscaler enterprise scale.
Anybody working in even classic datacenter physical ops already knows how to plug a KVM with a cell modem into a box to let the engineers remote in. That's assuming the racks aren't already built to support this natively these days.
Come on, this is the industry that is going gangbusters on the fetish of mass unemployment and deskilling, you don't think they're doing everything they can to have to only hire a few local bodies at minimum wage to basically pull a bad rack out and slot a new spare in?
RijilV 2 hours ago [-]
If you've never had an opportunity to spend time in a datacenter as a software developer, that's unfortunate but also far too common. What things look like on the inside vary company to company. Generally you're in an OSHA-abiding environment, so safety shoes, ear and eye protection, sometimes gloves.
There's a variety of roles. Security, electricians, HVAC engineers, generally some type of site foreman-ask role, logistics (depending on the size of the place), and technicians (for a lack of a better word, feels like every place calls them something different). There's a variety of roles that often float between sites or oversee many sites, depending again on the scale of the place. AWS is huge. Bigger than you're imagining, so there's quite a few levels deep and include real estate folks as well as construction roles. If you go and look at job postings, you'll even see roles for nuclear engineers at some companies.
But generally what you're talking about here are what I'm calling the technicians. They're responsible for wheeling racks into place (depending on the company they may also be responsible for unloading the trucks). Cabling is nearly always outsourced these days (though not the design of the cables), so rolling a rack into place generally involves securing it to the floor and connecting power, data, and more often than not now-a-days liquid cooling.
The other part of their job is "troubleshooting" failed hardware. Again, really depends on the company. Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up. I'm sure there are some great places to be a tech where you get to rip apart servers and bust out the multimeter, that to my understanding is not how the hyperscalers who actually hyper-scale do it.
There's some cleaning, parts management, destroying broken hard drives, shoveling snow off the roof (no lie), and a variety of other odd tasks.
If you ever have the opportunity to check out one of those places it can be a riot and a real eye opener. Depends again on the company though, some of those places have insane security (metal detectors, badge+pin, turnstile door procedures) which make visits super un-fun if they're even allowed outside of legit business reasons. Other companies... well I'm glad that's not where I store my data.
Back "in the day" (2005 give or take a handful of years) techs would often write their own automation and even build some simple services.
And yes, the jobs don't pay particularly well depending upon what it is. Electricians and such command decent wages, but the security guards and techs don't make crazy amounts. I think folks doing contract cabling can come out ahead.
Anyhow, SWEs are wildly insulated from the realities of what things look like on the ground. Maybe that's a good thing, IDK.
cyberax 2 hours ago [-]
It's not easy, actually. You will likely need to be a licensed electrician or a licensed plumber. Both occupations require around 4000 hours of apprenticeship.
Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.
altcognito 2 hours ago [-]
Oh! Thank goodness! 138 megawatts, they might be able to support the air conditioning systems with that much power.
mkhpalm 53 minutes ago [-]
I'm relieved to hear it's 138 megawatts instead of 6 to 10 gigawatts we keep hearing about elsewhere.
For 6–10 gigawatt data centers I consider what else that amount of power could support. At current desalination efficiencies, 6 gigawatts of continuous power could produce roughly 11–14 million acre-feet of freshwater per year, comparable to the historical annual flow of the Colorado River.
So a single 6 GW power supply could theoretically generate enough freshwater to replace most or all of the Colorado River's annual flow. The famous river that is stretched thin but supports up to around 45 million people from Denver all the way to San Diego and even Mexico. So the comparison is we can have a single AI datacenter or a drought-proof water supply for a region constantly under drought restrictions.
I'm not saying don't build the other dozen or so 6 to 10 gigawatt data centers everybody keeps talking about. I'm just saying maybe we can do one less of those and use some of that power to support ocean water desalination instead.
hooo 45 minutes ago [-]
138 megawatts is how much the company is investing in a "carbon-free energy project in the state" - not the power usage of the datacenter.
catlikesshrimp 2 hours ago [-]
Also, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.
jakebol 24 minutes ago [-]
138 MW is also nameplate capacity multiply that by effective utilization rate for ex solar (~20%) and it’s meaningless compared to the scale of the project.
That's not far from St. Louis and Fort Leonard Wood, a hub for basic training among other things. I wonder if that had any impact in the location.
philajan 2 hours ago [-]
I imagined the location has to do with the nearby Callaway Nuclear power plant, and the solar projects that Ameren have been putting up in Montgomery County for the past few years.
shermantanktop 2 hours ago [-]
How so? Not seeing the connection.
logankeenan 2 hours ago [-]
Data centers are critical infrastructure and having them near military bases could be seen as a security benefit.
* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33384628
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...
And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.
We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.
Perhaps voice your concern with your elected government representative?
Unless of course, you think your effort is useless.
If only...
I do believe that access to commercial AI should be regulated, heavily taxed, and controlled just as much as access to dangerous chemicals and weapons. Only this way the best AI models are more likely to indeed be used for frugal purposes (sadly, however, including ads).
However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.
It would be rather silly is a multi-billion dollar investment went down because, for some reason, admins couldn't remote in.
Anybody working in even classic datacenter physical ops already knows how to plug a KVM with a cell modem into a box to let the engineers remote in. That's assuming the racks aren't already built to support this natively these days.
Come on, this is the industry that is going gangbusters on the fetish of mass unemployment and deskilling, you don't think they're doing everything they can to have to only hire a few local bodies at minimum wage to basically pull a bad rack out and slot a new spare in?
There's a variety of roles. Security, electricians, HVAC engineers, generally some type of site foreman-ask role, logistics (depending on the size of the place), and technicians (for a lack of a better word, feels like every place calls them something different). There's a variety of roles that often float between sites or oversee many sites, depending again on the scale of the place. AWS is huge. Bigger than you're imagining, so there's quite a few levels deep and include real estate folks as well as construction roles. If you go and look at job postings, you'll even see roles for nuclear engineers at some companies.
But generally what you're talking about here are what I'm calling the technicians. They're responsible for wheeling racks into place (depending on the company they may also be responsible for unloading the trucks). Cabling is nearly always outsourced these days (though not the design of the cables), so rolling a rack into place generally involves securing it to the floor and connecting power, data, and more often than not now-a-days liquid cooling.
The other part of their job is "troubleshooting" failed hardware. Again, really depends on the company. Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up. I'm sure there are some great places to be a tech where you get to rip apart servers and bust out the multimeter, that to my understanding is not how the hyperscalers who actually hyper-scale do it.
There's some cleaning, parts management, destroying broken hard drives, shoveling snow off the roof (no lie), and a variety of other odd tasks.
If you ever have the opportunity to check out one of those places it can be a riot and a real eye opener. Depends again on the company though, some of those places have insane security (metal detectors, badge+pin, turnstile door procedures) which make visits super un-fun if they're even allowed outside of legit business reasons. Other companies... well I'm glad that's not where I store my data.
Back "in the day" (2005 give or take a handful of years) techs would often write their own automation and even build some simple services.
And yes, the jobs don't pay particularly well depending upon what it is. Electricians and such command decent wages, but the security guards and techs don't make crazy amounts. I think folks doing contract cabling can come out ahead.
Anyhow, SWEs are wildly insulated from the realities of what things look like on the ground. Maybe that's a good thing, IDK.
Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.
For 6–10 gigawatt data centers I consider what else that amount of power could support. At current desalination efficiencies, 6 gigawatts of continuous power could produce roughly 11–14 million acre-feet of freshwater per year, comparable to the historical annual flow of the Colorado River.
So a single 6 GW power supply could theoretically generate enough freshwater to replace most or all of the Colorado River's annual flow. The famous river that is stretched thin but supports up to around 45 million people from Denver all the way to San Diego and even Mexico. So the comparison is we can have a single AI datacenter or a drought-proof water supply for a region constantly under drought restrictions.
I'm not saying don't build the other dozen or so 6 to 10 gigawatt data centers everybody keeps talking about. I'm just saying maybe we can do one less of those and use some of that power to support ocean water desalination instead.
The AWS status page still shows UAE as disrupted https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status