| ▲ | throw10920 2 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous. > for the sake of shareholder value This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tenacious_tuna 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries. > This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it." We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams. I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me No they aren't They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money. The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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