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'America hates data centers,' new database reveals more than 90% of 10,000 public comments are negative
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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Sure, we could do that. But we'd need even more computer hardware that we don't have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there'd be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.
Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it's in a data center.
I say this as someone who's super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn't care about that I'd be paying for API access instead.
And of course lemmy finds this take to be controversial. ๐ Just commented that we already did the millions of server closets thing and it was an inefficient, unreliable mess. Any purists here need to punch out now, you're using a Cloudflare DC to read this.
We should improve society somewhat.
Not that I disagree with you, but what are you referring to by the millions of server closets thing?
Every website and corporate IT infra was run out of a local closet, or a mini data center in some cases. The cloud consolidated all that and is more energy efficient, secure (according to user setup!) and reliable. Going back to everyone doing their own thing would be awful, but given AWS pricing, I'm not sure why small corporations aren't already moving back inhouse.