CIRCLE WITH A DOT

Supposing we stopped building data centres ..We stopped buying new servers and just maintained what we have - replacing things when they wear out but stopped expanding.Software would get more efficient - there would still be room for expansion We could make more room by stopping crypto-scams, spam, and excessive bot activity Would we loose anything important ? I have 30 years industry experience - and I don't know that we would.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/12/the-guardian-view-on-ai-politics-us-datacentre-protests-are-a-warning-to-big-tech#ai #datacenter #it #bigTech

@mastodonmigration @stefan @willsigg @rasterweb @benroyce Yes, and aside from the content, which is obviously what everyone here loves so much, I'd like to point out the flawless delivery.

@benroyce

...Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10 percent of the cost to construct one data center, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centers without them...Poetry in architecture.https://futurism.com/science-energy/data-centers-construction-supply#datacenter #ai #iranwar

Observer | Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on Putting the First A.I. Data Center in Space by Tom SamiljanStarcloud-9293.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Three men in black shirts posing for a photo" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Philip Johnston (middle) and his co-founders, Adi Oltean (right) and <span style="font-weight: 400">Ezra Feilden (left).</span> <span class="lazyload media-credit">Gregor Elgee</span>'>In November, a 60-kilogram satellite the size of a small refrigerator called Starcloud-1 streaked into low Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket carrying the first data-center-class GPU ever operated in space—an Nvidia H100 roughly 100 times more powerful than any prior orbital compute. Within weeks, Starcloud, the company making the satellite, announced it had trained a language model on the complete works of Shakespeare and had run Google’s Gemini from roughly 200 miles above Earth.“The spacecraft is performing better than we could have hoped for,” Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, told Observer. Johnston founded the Redmond, Wash. company in early 2024, backed by a conviction that has since attracted $200 million from investors, including Nvidia, In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator: Rather than build better infrastructure on Earth to satiate A.I.’s runaway energy appetite, move the infrastructure off of Earth entirely. Today (March 30), the company announced it raised a $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, helping it reach unicorn status in just 17 months (and the quickest to do so in Y Combinator’s history).Johnston, 39, brings a distinctly financial pragmatism to the cosmos. Before pivoting to aerospace, Johnston served as an algorithmic trader at BNP Paribas, consulted for national space agencies at McKinsey and co-founded Opontia, an e-commerce aggregator that raised $46 million before being acquired.Starcloud-1 is the first data center in spaceOrbital data centers have a cooling problemSpace data centers are gaining steam amid regulatory and political risksRead more: https://observer.com/2026/03/starcloud-ceo-philip-johnston-nvidia-space-data-center/#datacenter #nvidia #space #spacex

@paul I doubt that would stop them... Some have obviously agreed to selling their ground. And these people have enough money to buy their own army.

A data center opened next door. Then came the high-pitched whine.“We don’t want to be outside anymore,” said Shaw, a cybersecurity professional living in Loudoun County, one of the densest data center hotbeds on Earth. “A lot of people might see this as progress, like I did. But if it’s impacting you then you see, ‘Oh, that’s what it means for a data center to be in your community.’”https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/11/data-centers-ai-electricity-virginia-00815219#datacenter #ai #uspol