No shit. Datacentres DO NOT CREATE JOBS.
They’re massive server rooms. There is no user interaction, just some jobbing tech swinging past every time something pings a remote alert on grafana
Not entirely true. There are always changes and work. A dozen of us worked in Melbourne’s datacentre alley (fishermen’s bend) for several years and we were just working for a single Telco. Data centres also enable work from home for us all. Without the server farms near the internet exchanges we wouldn’t be able to do this. The fact that AI data centres aren’t what we all use, a lot of people do use these tools. Don’t get me wrong, I think the data centres should more regulations around them mainly around water and electricity use.
Yes, but they don’t create jobs the way that the shysters and the spinners are claiming they do. I’ve worked in several NOCs and while there’s work in them, they are not job creators.
Telcos are also a bit of a different scenario, especially if you’re dealing with anyone that has handled landlines in their past. Lotta legacy patchwork. ISPs that onsell mobile are an entirely different beast because the purpose of a radius server is to crave death
Firstly, fuck Telstra’s radius system. Secondly, no industry is shyster free. Farms only use imported labour; construction uses coercion; logistics treats people like shit; medical and pharmaceutical take advantage of people’s fear; child and elder care are for profit centres that take advantage of the good nature of people. We can’t live without any of those industries and the data world is no different. Like it or not, over the last 5 decades our world has been online. Firstly into private systems of banks and government departments and now into public systems owned by private companies. Data centres need regulation but still need to exist to keep all of our jobs and communities running.
…Are you replying to the right comment? I’ve been very very clear on the difference between a DC and an LLM DC, which is what this article is about, and I certainly have not invited the rest of your paragraph.
These will not produce jobs.
I am replying to correct comment. Wasn’t looking for an invite. Just stating facts that it will create jobs and that there are shysters everywhere. The indirect employment of a datacentre is societies main benefit. AI slop is not something I want but I do want AI agents helping chemists find new compounds or doctors figure out DNA quirks. These things require compute which takes power and water.
The “AI” DCs they’re building aren’t the cancer detecting genome mapping kind. They’re for the slop kind. These are all LLM crapholes
Show me one [AI] data centre advocate that isn’t either a paid off politician or an AI company CEO
Oooh - here’s a nuanced take: I’m tentatively a data centre advocate. At least the data centre of the sort in the article’s pictures. That’s a NextDC data centre. Those are different to all the AI ones being spawned recently.
The way NextDC works is they take all server racks that used to live in business’ server rooms and put them together in two locations (Most cities have two for redundancy). Such data centres have been around for decades. We had a data centre in Perth in the mid-90’s, though it was tiny/basic by today’s standards - today that organisation is called IIA and has data centres in every Australian city.
For the first 20 years of my career, every place I worked had a server room. Even tiny businesses had a token server somewhere in the building handling shared files and maybe company email. Today, that stuff is all hosted in data centres. All the Cloud buzzwords you’ve been hearing about for the last 15 years or so? Data centres.
The reason I advocate for these is they are more efficient. By sharing the infrastructure like power and water in one location, they use less overall than they used to when spread all over town. Because business pay a lot for every single rack they rent, they reduce their footprints as much as possible. That goes for the amount of power they draw, and how many racks they can get away with. When you own your own server room, you think nothing of having 15 racks of servers. When each rack costs tens of thousands per month to be located in a data centre, you get super efficient about using as few as possible.
This very site runs on data centres. Multiple vendors: Cloudflare, Amazon, couple of others. Though for all I know some of them are in the same physical data centre.
The headline however is about AI data centres, and yeah - I’m no advocate there. There’s a gold rush at present to build immense infrastructure so that some businesses will be ready for demand that simply is not coming. Some AI will stay, but they are building orders of magnitude more infrastructure than is needful right now.
Edit: I just saw on the NextDC site that ChatGPT is going to host their Australian servers with NextDC. Sooooo I dunno what I think about that. At least they aren’t building more data centres in Australia?
Yeah this is the thing that worries me - conflating DCs in general with LLM dcs. No. Don’t do that. You want data centres. That’s where all the important infrastructure lives. What you don’t want are plagiarism machine factories
