巴黎马克思的新书不可能在更好的时机登陆。 Big Tech的长期评论家和Tech Won't Save Us podcast的主持人多年来一直在考虑数据中心，Hyperscale: The Ambition and overer of Big Tech's Data Empires 以反对达到的发烧口出场。
称笑了一下。
虽然数据中心在塑造美国选举方面正在发挥作用，但它们是不到两周内就能决定关键中期赛的问题之一，但世界各地都有斗争的历史。 马克思的书让读者参观了技术产业对权力的追求及其反对，从越南战争期间针对美国计算机的反战抗议，到爱尔兰和智利最近的抵抗，以及新西兰数据中心未来的另类愿景。
我本周赶到他身边
此次采访经过了编辑和压缩，以明确。
你什么时候决定写一本关于数据中心的书的？
PARISMARX：在荷兰和新加坡，他们有暂停期可以追溯到2019年。 但是在2022年，人们越来越认识到爱尔兰数据中心的需求，特别是对能源网的需求。 数据中心开始消耗大量的电力。
另一个真正出现在我雷达上的故事是 Google在俄勒冈州 Dalles发生的事。 Google真的试图隐藏其水利用数字，以至于它让市议会试图将水利用数字保密。 在社区最终获得实际数字之前，他们一直保持了一年多的时间，并发现Google正在使用社区29%的水。
ChatGPT于2022年底出道。 很明显地，需要有更多的数据中心对于基因AI。 这些地方已经感受到了重要的数据中心建设的影响，感觉这很快会开始进入更多的社区。
我觉得很多美国人认为数据中心刚刚突然出现美国在过去的一两年里，正好是这个巨大的中期问题。 我喜欢你那本书的一面就是显示我们其他国家和社区如何作为预警信号
爱尔兰是可能发生的事情的真正例子。 都柏林曾于2021年通过暂停令。 称实际上是电网操作员，“嘿，数据中心太多。 我们没有电网能力连接其中的任何人。”
作为回应，你让这个行业移动确保它仍然可以在爱尔兰建立数据中心。 他们无法在都柏林获得电网连接，所以他们开始在爱尔兰其他地区寻找建筑。 他们还研究了如何开始挖掘天然气网络，以便使用发电机。 最终，他们开始建造专门的燃气发电厂，为数据中心提供动力，而不是连接到电网。
爱尔兰能源网是一个公共电网——只有公用事业部门才能建造电力线。 而数据中心公司实际上游说立法基本上允许私人公司建造电缆。 这显然涉及许多人，并提出了有关制度公平的问题。
天然气似乎对美国现在发生的事情非常有把握
[数据中心运营商]正在从爱尔兰环境保护局获得这些排放许可证，以便能够燃烧所有这些化石燃料。 该机构警告说，气候目标现在将更加难以实现。
我并不感到惊讶。 我之前也看过这个故事。 但是，它的规模是惊人的，它是如何迅速升级的。
物理基础设施——从煤气厂到数据中心本身——会怎样呢？如果这个行业崩溃，这些基础设施会怎样？这有历史先例吗？
我觉得我们是在AI泡沫。 但泡沫的倒塌是什么样子的？他们计划增加所有这些数据中心和所有这些燃气发电厂以便给数据中心供电。 但有些问题涉及获得涡轮机，获得芯片，为数据中心本身获得不同种类的谜题。 在对AI的需求进行重新评估之前
我们经常谈论在dotcom的繁荣和崩溃中纤维容量的过度积累。 但也有数据中心的建立——显然比我们现在的要早得多。 很多数据中心公司倒闭了 Equinix等幸存下来的公司，购买了一吨数据中心，以便在这种能力恢复时做好准备。
但是我们现在的问题是，如果数据中心被计划用于AI，而我们是在假设芯片必须在几年内循环使用的情况下运行的。 即使数据中心存在，它最有价值的是什么在要求返回的时候可能不会有用。
不可避免的是，即使数据中心不来，那么这些天然气厂就会存在。 他们将会寻找新的客户来证明他们存在的理由。 我敢肯定，人们建造它们并不是为了仅仅关闭它们。
你以新西兰的一个具体例子结束这本书，以社区为首，我非常喜欢这个非采掘方式的另类构想，你有没有想过我们能做些什么来做一些改变。...........
我希望看到政府真正努力制定更严格的数据中心发展条例。 但是，这些也应当与关于AI产品本身的条例相配合。 我们有很多承诺关于什么基因AI会提供，还没有实现。 还有一长串来自这些技术的伤害，我们没有被告知它们会随之而来。 我们的政府似乎并不那么愿意真正接受这一点。 他们正在购买一种叙事，即基因AI仍然是山姆·阿尔特曼在2023年初卖给它的，而不是今天的。
我认为，我们确实需要思考我们如何做不同的技术，特别是在这个时刻，我们正在投入这么多的资源用于基础设施，我们应该问，我们到底需要多少计算？有多少资源可以实际用于这一项目？我们究竟能从中得到什么？我们从硅谷创造的东西得到的东西能证明我们为了实现它而集体牺牲的资源是正当的吗？如果我们真的做了评估，我认为，我们将非常清楚地发现，我们目前所做的一切是没有道理的——从财政角度，也从社会和环境角度。
我们写的东西
说到这些气候目标，我的同事乔尔·哈利勒(Joel Khalil)讲述了欧盟对AI的渴求，乔尔告诉我，如果数据中心成为欧洲的政治闪点，“欧洲数据中心建设的有趣之处在于相互竞争的利益冲突：国家一级的政策与地方优先事项相冲突，经济增长的雄心与气候目标相冲突，“很难理解欧洲如何能够拥有这一切。
我们在读什么
- 《纽约时报》报道了AI和数据中心的繁荣如何推动一种令人惊讶的商品：灰色油漆。
- 德克萨斯州数据中心的大规模建设威胁到州治空气污染多年的进展。 德克萨斯州论坛报有更多。
- Google已道歉在芬兰清理了800多英亩的森林，但没有获得建造1 300万欧元数据中心项目所需的环境许可证。 “卫报”报导，科技巨头正面临国内的反弹
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Paris Marx’s new book couldn’t have landed at a better time. The longtime critic of Big Tech and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast has been thinking about data centers for years, and Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires comes out right as opposition hits a fever pitch.
“I certainly didn't predict that it was all going to kind of come to a head as my book was coming out,” he says with a laugh.
While data centers are playing a role in shaping US elections—they’re one of the issues that could decide key midterm races in less than two weeks—there’s a history of struggle around the world. Marx’s book takes the reader on a tour of the tech industry’s quest for power and its opposition, from antiwar protests targeting American computers during the Vietnam War, to more recent resistance in Ireland and Chile, and an alternative vision for the future of data centers in New Zealand.
I caught up with him this week to talk about what he’s seen, and what could happen if the AI bubble pops.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
MOLLY TAFT: When did you decide to write a book about data centers?
PARIS MARX: In the Netherlands and Singapore, they had moratoriums going back to 2019. But in 2022, there was a growing recognition of the demands of data centers in Ireland, on the energy grid in particular. There were huge quantities of electricity that data centers were starting to consume over there.
The other story that really got on my radar was what happened with Google in The Dalles, Oregon. Google was really trying to hide its water use figures, to the degree that it got the city council to try to keep its water use figures secret. They kept that going for the better part of a year before the community finally got the actual numbers and found out that Google was using 29 percent of the water in the community.
ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022. It became apparent that there's going to need to be a lot more data centers for generative AI. These places were already feeling the effects of significant data center construction, and it felt like that was going to start coming to a lot more communities very soon.
I feel like a lot of Americans think data centers just came out of the blue in the US over the past year or two, just in time to be this huge midterms issue. One thing I like about your book is that it shows us how other countries and communities served as early warning signs.
Ireland was a real example of what can happen. Dublin had a moratorium passed back in 2021. It was actually the grid operator that said, “Hey, there are too many data centers. We do not have the grid capacity to connect any more of them.”
In response to that, you had the industry moving to make sure it can still build data centers in Ireland. They can't get grid connections in Dublin, so they start looking at building in other parts of Ireland. They also looked at starting to tap into the gas network so they can use generators. Eventually, they start building dedicated gas power plants to power their data centers instead of connecting to the grid.
The Irish energy grid is a public grid—only the public utility can build electricity lines. And data center companies actually lobbied for legislation that essentially allows private companies to build electricity cables. That obviously concerns a lot of people and presents questions about equity in the system.
The gas stuff looks so prescient with what’s happening in the US now, where companies are racing to build these massive private gas power plants for data centers.
[Data center operators] were getting these emission licenses from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency to be able to burn all these fossil fuels. The agency was warning that climate targets are going to be a lot harder to achieve now.
When I started to see that happen in the US, I wasn’t surprised. I’d already seen the story play out before. But the scale of it is staggering, and how quickly it’s escalated.
What happens to the physical infrastructure—from the gas plants to the data centers themselves—that's getting built out if this industry falls apart? Is there historic precedent for that?
I think we're in an AI bubble. But what does the collapse of that bubble look like? They're planning to add all these data centers and all of these gas power plants in order to power the data centers. But there are issues with getting turbines, with getting chips, with getting different kinds of pieces of the puzzle for the data center itself. Are these even going to get built out before there’s a reassessment of the demand for AI?
We often talk about the excess build-out of fiber capacity back in the dotcom boom and bust. But there was also a build-out of data centers—obviously a much earlier stage than what we're at now. A lot of data center companies went under. Companies like Equinix, which did survive, bought up a ton of data centers to be ready for when that capacity returned.
But the issue we have now is that if data centers are being planned for AI use, and we’re operating under the assumption that the chips are going to have to be cycled out within a few years. Even if the data center is there, what makes it most valuable is potentially not going to be useful by the time that demand returns.
Inevitably, even if the data centers don't come, then those gas plants will exist. They will be looking for new customers to justify their existence. I'm sure that people are not building them with the intention to just shut them down.
You ended the book with a specific example in New Zealand of a community-led effort to create a more accurate speech-recognition model of the Māori language, using local cloud providers to host the data. I really liked this alternative vision of a non-extractive way to harness the powers of AI. Have you thought about what we could do to make some changes and how this build-out is going?
I would like to see governments go really hard on actually putting firmer regulations on the development of data centers. But those should also be paired with regulations on the AI products themselves. We had a lot of promises about what generative AI was going to deliver that haven't been realized. There has also been a long list of harms that have arisen from these technologies that we were not told would come along with them. Our governments do not seem to be so willing to actually take that on. They're buying the narrative that generative AI is still what Sam Altman sold it to be in early 2023 rather than what it has become today.
I think that we do need to be thinking of how we do technology differently, especially in this moment where we're dedicating so many resources to the infrastructure to enable generative AI. We should be asking, how much computation do we really need? How many resources are actually justifiable to put into this project? What are we actually getting out of it, right? Does what we're getting from what Silicon Valley is creating really justify the resources that we are collectively sacrificing in order to realize it? If we actually did the assessment, I think that we would very clearly find that there's no way to justify what we are doing right now—from a financial perspective, but also from a social and environmental one.
What We’re Writing
Speaking of those climate targets, it’s not just the Irish government that’s thinking about them. My colleague Joel Khalil covers how the European Union’s thirst for AI is running into European countries’ climate goals. Joel tells me he wouldn’t be surprised if data centers become a political flash point in Europe, like they are in the US, as countries go to the polls next year. “The fascinating thing about the European data center build-out is the collision of competing interests: national-level policy butts up against local priorities, ambitions for economic growth stand in conflict with climate objectives, and planning bureaucracy foils attempts by AI companies to rapidly expand their fleets,” he says. “It’s hard to see how Europe could possibly have it all.”
What We’re Reading
- The New York Times covers how the AI and data center boom is boosting a surprising commodity: gray paint.
- The massive build-out of data centers in Texas threatens years of progress in the state cutting air pollution. The Texas Tribune has more.
- Google has apologized for clearing more than 800 acres of forest in Finland without getting the necessary environmental permits to build part of a €13 million data center project. The Guardian reports that the tech giant is facing backlash in the country that could bleed into elections next spring.
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Gem Box. All rights belong to the original author.