@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.
"Pointless is increasingly becoming the word I use for AI."—
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing >
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/14/ai_running_out_of_juice/
"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.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/microsoft_natural_gas_ai/
#LLMs #Microsoft #AI #datacenters
#environment #energy #sustainability
#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?
Can Carbon Capture Keep Up with AI’s Energy Demand? https://www.byteseu.com/822929/ #AIElectricityUse #CarbonCapture #CarbonCredits #CarbonStorage #CcsTechnology #CleanEnergy #ClimateChange #DataCenters #ElectricityConsumption #Energy #EnergyDemand #EnergyInfrastructure #FossilFuels #google #microsoft #NaturalGasEmissions #PowerPlants #RenewableEnergy #U.S.PowerGrid
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.
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/nachhaltigkeitsziele-bund-scheitert-an-gruener-it/
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.”
Microsoft’s AI Cloud Shift Leaves CoreWeave in Precarious Position Before IPO
#Microsoft #CoreWeave #AICloud #AI #CloudComputing #GPUs #DataCenters #MicrosoftAzure #AIInfrastructure #AIComputing #Cloud çBigTech
The UK is embracing AI at any cost as it’s desperate to increase economic growth. But is that a good strategy?
On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with James Meadway to discuss what’s happening in the UK and the consequences of allowing US tech to dominate.
Listen to the full episode: https://techwontsave.us/episode/266_the_uks_misguided_embrace_of_ai_hype_w_james_meadway
https://cardinalnews.org/2025/01/21/virginia-now-imports-more-electricity-than-any-other-state/ “At the same time that Virginia is mandating an elimination of carbon-based fuels, we’re importing more carbon-based fuel.” #Virginia #solar #shortage #power #DataCenters #coal #climate
How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00616-z
"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."
"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."
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 […]
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. https://docs.google.com/document/d/15IKPbianhoStacdzAQyTHz1IUblJ2elKK8VZzx0bCrc/edit?usp=sharing #Virginia #DataCenters
NVIDIA doesn't care about gamers. They would, obviously, if they were a 3.6B market compared to 230M.
Just added to bookwyrm "Acid Clouds: Mapping Data Center Topologies"
https://bookwyrm.social/book/1915648/s/acid-clouds
If you're based #Rotterdam, there will be a book launch conversation with one of the editors and contributors on March 27th
https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/book-launch-acid-clouds
Includes contribution from 
@mel_hogan
