In cold climate markets with a lot of fiber or other very fast access like very good 5G, why don’t AI companies or their cloud vendors market home or building scale heating compute nodes?

They could be built so that they exhaust waste heat into the HVAC system in winter and then switch to an outside piped radiator in the summer or something similar.

End users wouldn’t buy it. They’d make some kind of deal where one is installed and they pay less for heat and the extra electricity is paid by the compute operator via a separate meter. So the DC operator gets cooling that is (averaged over the year) almost free since they are basically reselling the heat for half the year or more.

For individual homes it might be unwieldy to manage a bunch of small units, so apartment/condo blocks and businesses might make more sense for installation. They could be colocated with building HVAC.

I guess economics depends on what percentage of DC cost is power or water for cooling.

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Gravityloss 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a relatively new thing but over here, in a cold climate, data centers are now often built so they are connected to district heating networks and the waste heat is utilized.

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franktankbank 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LOL. You can hack any computer if you have local access. No way in hell you could ever get past the most basic of audits with such a business layout.

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api 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Every use case isn’t security critical. There’s a lot of AI used to render silly images and films, generate marketing copy, play games, proofread social media posts, etc.

You solve this by charging a little more for security certified AI that runs in a secure DC.

You can also easily randomize AI work load distribution, so individual nodes don’t get all queries for a whole coherent conversation or project. It makes an attack less valuable.

Apple has done some research on blinding and obfuscating AI too.

	▲	franktankbank 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I get the sense that you don't understand security at a fundamental level. Its one thing to run non deterministic algorithms, its another thing to tie your account to a box running CP nodes. Anybody who buys into that future of computing is a complete fucktard. I'll be in my cabin.