Yes, data centers use a lot of water. Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity. But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly.”
OPINION — From national politics down to local neighborhood discussion, America seems to be in full-blown moral panic about data centers.
The two main concerns voiced by both politicians and my neighbors boil down to arguments that the increasing number and size (due to the push toward resource-intensive artificial intelligence in pretty much everything) of data centers requires “too much” electricity and “too much” water.
That may be true … right now. But will it be true a few years from now? Not likely. Why? Well, let’s look at some history.
When Henry Ford introduced his “Quadricycle” — a gasoline-powered automobile mounted on bicycle wheels — in 1896, most American roads were just dirt paths. By the early 1900s, Ford and others were pumping out thousands of the new-fangled “horseless carriages.”
With the cars came complaints: Dirt roads turned into perpetual dust clouds as “rolling firetraps” careened dangerously down them, loudly and with frequent exhaust backfires, scaring horses that drew the “traditional” wagons and carriages. A hue and cry arose against the dangers and inconveniences of the “devil wagons.”
But then, cars got quieter (as inventors introduced mufflers), their brakes were improved, and the roads were paved. Over time, people ended up with cheaper, safer, faster and more-reliable transportation. And the streets and roads stopped being large-scale dumping grounds for animal feces, arguably improving health conditions.
That process of improvement hasn’t ended yet. My wife’s 2006 SUV gets about three times as many miles per gallon (in town) as the Oldsmobile coupe I drove in my youth, and is probably a lot safer, even correcting for her “mature woman” driving skills versus my “crazy male teen” habits.
Getting a little more modern, consider computers: My Linux Mini PC, like the Commodore VIC-20 I got for Christmas in 1983, runs on 20-25 watts of electricity. But the mini PC — which cost about one-third as much as the Commodore after accounting for inflation — boasts 3 million times as much RAM and runs about 3,000 times as fast.
Yes, data centers use a lot of water. Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity. But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly.
Unless there’s some really bizarre change to the historical arc of invention and innovation, we are at the peak, not the low point, of data-center resource usage.
In fact, shortly before I began writing this piece, Wired ran an article on a recent innovation by Amazon that “delivers 33 percent higher data throughput, cuts network power consumption by 40 percent, and lowers operating costs by 27 percent.”
Future CPUS and their associated equipment will run faster (meaning fewer are needed for the same jobs), cooler (meaning less water is needed to cool them), and on less electricity.
Those innovations won’t just benefit the operators of data centers. Regular consumers will also see cheaper, faster, better products at the retail level — and lower utility bills to boot.
The future is always scary … until it actually gets here.
Thomas L. Knapp is a director and senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, where this was first published. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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