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#datacenters

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@EUCommission I don't say hello as long as these #dataCenters lead to an immense climate-damaging footprint (water consumption/electricity), can even increase electricity costs for inhabitants of such an area. As long as there are no ethical guidelines. As long as these things scrape everything without restraint, appropriate copyrighted content and thus massively harm the #authors. I say: we could use the money for urgently needed social and climate projects!

Weekly output: 5G platforms, AI in financial services, AI and supply chains, Kamala Harris on AI, AI infrastructure, Gmail’s AI calendar integration, Android 16, AI and information security

It’s a rare week when my work doesn’t touch on AI at all, but moderating panels at a conference devoted to that subject–and writing up two other talks there–helped ensure that AI figured in all but two of the items below.

3/10/2025: Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework, Light Reading

My MWC Barcelona coverage for outside clients closed out with this writeup for this trade-pub client–my first there in a few months–of a panel in which telco executives talked about how they were building new lines of business on their 5G platforms.

Patreon readers, however, got one more post about MWC in which I shared three other highlights from the show.

3/10/2025: Banking on AI for personalized customer experiences, HumanX

The first panel I did at this conference–in Las Vegas for its first year, moving to San Francisco next year–had me quizzing Better.com’s Vishal Garg, Clearcover’s Kyle Nakatsuji, Honeybook’s Colleen Stauffer, Sunrise AI’s Deepak Shrivastava and S&P Global’s Bhavesh Dayalji about how they see AI changing customer service.

3/10/2025: AI-powered supply chains: From farm to table and beyond, HumanX

Since this panel–featuring Altana’s Peter Swartz, Fusion Fund’s Lu Zhang and Choco AI’s Daniel Khachab–focused on agriculture, I opened it by telling the audience that I found the subject particularly interesting because I eat food.

3/11/2025: Kamala Harris Urges Those Working on AI to Consider Trust, Empathy, PCMag

The former vice president–whom I last saw in person in October from much farther away–was a late addition to the conference agenda. I hustled to get from the airport to the conference hotel, check in, drop by bag and get over to the event in time to get a seat in the third row for the Sunday-evening program that ended with Harris.

3/11/2025: Rethinking infrastructure: Custom solutions for the AI era, HumanX

My big takeaway from the conversation I had onstage with Sid Sheth of d-Matrix and Ami Badani of Arm: Industry hype about AGI (“artificial general intelligence” that could replicate a human brain) is a distraction, and not a particularly helpful one at that.

3/11/2025: Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007, PCMag

I missed this Google announcement Monday but had to write about it once I realized that the feature Google touts as an AI advancement is something that Apple delivered with plain old software in Mac OS X Leopard 18 years ago.

3/13/2025: Android 16 Inches Toward a Launch With Accessibility-Focused Third Beta Release, PCMag

Google PR gave me an advance on the news of third beta release of Android 16.

3/14/2025: Ex-Facebook CISO Warns: 95% of Bugs in Your AI System Haven’t Been Invented Yet, PCMag

I always learn something when Alex Stamos talks about information security, and I was happy to share that with PCMag readers.

"Microsoft tempted to hit the gas as renewables can't keep up with AI"

The not so hidden costs of the so-called AI. This is your contribution every single time you use Copilot, ChatGPT and all that crap, and if you do really believe the "...with carbon capture technology..." part, at best, you're naive.

theregister.com/2025/03/13/mic

#LLMs #Microsoft #AI #datacenters
#environment #energy #sustainability

The Register · Microsoft tempted to hit the gas as renewables can't keep up with AIBy Dan Robinson

#AI's Billion-Dollar Land Grab — 5 Ways It's Reshaping #RealEstate

A silent land rush is underway — AI giants like OpenAI and Meta are buying up real estate at an unprecedented scale. But why, and what does it mean for the future of property markets?

entrepreneur.com/science-techn

Entrepreneur · Tech Giants Are Pouring Billions Into AI Data Centers — Are We Ready for the Real Estate Shift That Comes With It?By Sabeer Nelli

Este artículo analiza el fracaso de las políticas que buscaban unos #CentrosDeDatos más verdes en Alemania.

El gobierno alemán tenía grandes esperanzas puestas en sus objetivos de sostenibilidad en el acuerdo de coalición de 2021: poner en común los centros de datos, utilizar el calor residual, cambiar a electricidad verde, comprar productos informáticos con el sello Ángel Azul.

Sin embargo, Anke Domscheit-Berg, ( @ankedb ) portavoz de política digital del Partido de Izquierda, fue mordaz en su valoración de que estos objetivos se habían incumplido con creces.

Algunas de estas medidas parecen buenas, pero se quedan en papel mojado si no se cumplen, que es lo que parece que ha pasado. Además, están desperdiciando el potente papel que tiene el Estado como consumidor de dichos servicios.

"Solo con su inmenso poder de mercado, el Gobierno federal podría influir en los proveedores para que sus productos informáticos fueran más sostenibles", afirma Domscheit-Berg. Pero simplemente dejó escapar esta oportunidad. Aunque existen "resoluciones, directrices y especificaciones", no hay "ningún compromiso, ninguna transparencia en cuanto a la aplicación y nadie que se sienta realmente responsable".

P.D. Gracias a @earthworm
y @roofjoke por compartir la información.

netzpolitik.org/2025/nachhalti

netzpolitik.org · Nachhaltigkeitsziele: Bund scheitert an grüner ITNicht erst die Ampel-Koalition hat versprochen, staatliche Rechenzentren und Websites nachhaltiger zu machen. Die Antwort der Bundesregierung auf eine Kleine Anfrage zeigt nun jedoch: Der Bund bleibt in puncto Bundes-IT weit hinter seinen Umweltzielen zurück. Dabei könnte er eigentlich als Großkunde Druck auf die Betreiber machen.

Technical University of Munich: New method significantly reduces AI energy consumption. “The enormous computing resources needed to train neural networks for artificial intelligence (AI) result in massive power consumption. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a method that is 100 times faster and therefore much more energy efficient.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/10/technical-university-of-munich-new-method-significantly-reduces-ai-energy-consumption/

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz · Technical University of Munich: New method significantly reduces AI energy consumption | ResearchBuzz: Firehose
More from ResearchBuzz: Firehose

How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown

nature.com/articles/d41586-025

"From a global perspective, AI’s impact on future electricity demand is actually projected to be relatively small. But data centres are concentrated in dense clusters, where they can have profound local impacts."

www.nature.comHow much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknownResearchers want firms to be more transparent about the electricity demands of artificial intelligence.

"At worst, this situation could suggest that Microsoft is actively dumping OpenAI, and is having questions about the fundamentals of the generative AI industry.

In very plain terms, Microsoft, despite its excitement around artificial intelligence and its dogged insistence that it’s the future of technology, has canceled data center leases and over a gigawatt of other datacenter infrastructure. Doing so heavily suggests that Microsoft does not intend to expand its data center operations, or at least, to the extraordinary levels the company initially promised.

While Microsoft has reiterated that it intends to spend $80 billion in capital expenditures on AI in 2025, it's unclear how it intends to do so if it’s pulling back on data center expansion at such a large scale, and the company has provided no tangible explanation or elaboration as to how it might do so. While hardware upgrades could account for some of its capital expenditures, it would be nowhere near the $80bn figure.

Again, hyperscale datacenters aren’t cheap. They’re massive, billion-dollar (or multi-billion) ventures."

wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At · Power CutA week ago, analyst TD Cowen revealed that Microsoft had canceled leases "totalling a couple hundred MWs," with "at least two private data center operators across multiple US markets." The report also details how Microsoft "pulled back on converting negotiated and signed Statement[s] of Qualifications (SQQs)," which it added

Jefferson Lab: Next Top Model: Competition-Based AI Study Aims to Lower Data Center Costs. “Who, or rather what, will be the next top model? Data scientists and developers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are trying to find out, exploring some of the latest artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help make high-performance computers more […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/04/next-top-model-competition-based-ai-study-aims-to-lower-data-center-costs-jefferson-lab/

For those wanting to know what they can do to help stop or at least reform data centers in #Virginia, I created an email template you can copy and paste into an email to your legislator/city council member, etc. Chesterfield is looking at two data center proposals, and Dominion wants to build an additional five fossil fuel plants to power them in the coming decade. docs.google.com/document/d/15I #Virginia #DataCenters

Google DocsData Center email templateDear [Legislator's Name], I am writing to bring your attention to the growing challenges posed by the rapid expansion of data centers and to urge you to consider implementing stronger regulations and oversight to address these issues. While data centers are critical to supporting our digital econ...

Just added to bookwyrm "Acid Clouds: Mapping Data Center Topologies"

bookwyrm.social/book/1915648/s

If you're based #Rotterdam, there will be a book launch conversation with one of the editors and contributors on March 27th

nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/b

Includes contribution from ♥ @mel_hogan

bookwyrm.socialAcid Clouds - BookWyrmAcid Clouds: Mapping Data Centre Topologies explores the hidden infrastructures of our digital lives, exposing the political, ecological and social dynamics that data centres embody. It goes beyond the sanitised image of the ‘cloud’ and unravels the material and ethical complexities of these often overlooked data storage structures. Edited by Niels Schrader and Jorinde Seijdel, the book features essays by international authors examining data centres from perspectives ranging from artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital commons, decolonialism and technodiversity to urban strategies, environmental impacts, extractivism, algorithmic bias and digital capitalism. Roel Backaert’s night-time photographs of 101 Dutch data centres capture their imposing presence and question their hidden impact. Together, these perspectives illuminate the power structures, environmental impacts and cultural implications of data centres. Acid Clouds encourages readers to rethink the ethics of our digital dependency and poses vital questions. How can we rethink ownership and control over data? How can we resist the extractive tendencies of digital capitalism and envision a more just, digital future? The book challenges us to critically engage with the hidden yet ubiquitous infrastructures that shape our world. Text contributions by Ramon Amaro & Sheena Calvert, Annet Dekker, Mél Hogan, Michiel van Iersel & Mark Minkjan, Marina Otero Verzier, Ned Rossiter, Niels Schrader, Jorinde Seijdel, Füsun Türetken, Waag (Marleen Stikker, Max Kortlander, Sander van der Waal), and photography by Roel Backaert in collaboration with Niels Schrader.