this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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So, if I understand this correctly, a few individuals in the USA are buying up all the RAM and GPUs being manufactured in the world, with huge loans that they are hoping they will be able to pay off someday, to put into some of the biggest data centers ever constructed, all over cheap, peaceful villages, for which the electric grid has to be substantially upgraded, massively increasing our carbon emissions, and a large portion of the available fresh water supply has to be redirected, so that we can consume:

  • Generative AI: A Large Language Model (LLM) that has gobbled up most of humanity's literature and content on the Internet, so that it can predict the next word in a sentence.
  • Agentic AI: A list of traditional IF THEN statements that do things based on the output of the magical LLM and then create a new prompt that they feed back into the LLM in a never ending loop, with the aim of consuming as many tokens as possible.
  • Ontology: A long list of relationships between real-world objects and concepts to constantly remind the LLM not to make up impossible stuff.

Correct?

I suspect that they have run out of ideas how to make us buy new smartphones.

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[–] turdburglar@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

ok. well in memphis elon is using 5 million gallons a day of fresh aquifer drinking water and then dumping it in the mississippi river.

he told the city that he would build a water treatment plant for his own use to curb the waste of drinking water.

he then ‘paused’ the building of the plant (still in its plannning phase) and instead is building more computer warehouses for grok.

please do not use grok.

[–] riskable@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't know that story, but if the data center isn't built yet, that's just the normal water consumption that would be required for any building construction.

Building big buildings uses a lot of water. It's necessary for dust management, soil compaction, etc. They literally just spray it everywhere during construction and that's actually very important! LOL.

It always amuses me when I see people complaining about data centers that are still under construction using "millions of gallons" of water. I'm thinking, "yeah dude, that's how construction works."

They never complained about the construction water usage of all the other buildings in the area which make the "huge data center" look like a drop in the ocean for that kind of thing.

[–] turdburglar@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

well setting your patronizing tone aside, it is not under construction. it’s the multiple colossus sites in memphis. elon has been running diesel turbines to power it for over a year.

and he’s using aquifer water to cool it.

maybe stop being an ass and read up on these things before correcting people who live next to this bullshit.