Relentlessly material
March 20, 2024 1:44 AM Subscribe
To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
Once again I am repeating, "There is no cloud, only other people's computers."
posted by wenestvedt at 4:45 AM on March 20 [29 favorites]
posted by wenestvedt at 4:45 AM on March 20 [29 favorites]
I'd extend that with "other people's environmental impacts that you can ignore because they're poor and/or brown."
A group of activists here in Santiago recently sued to stop the construction of a google datacenter that would have sucked up an insane amount of the available ground water. They won, for now.
posted by signal at 5:25 AM on March 20 [23 favorites]
A group of activists here in Santiago recently sued to stop the construction of a google datacenter that would have sucked up an insane amount of the available ground water. They won, for now.
posted by signal at 5:25 AM on March 20 [23 favorites]
Especially frustrating to read this after yet again accidentally saving a file to a OneDrive account I never wanted and will never intentionally use...
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:01 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:01 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]
probably not good that there are hundreds of billions of dollars now flowing into some of the most compute intensive work and that it serves essentially no purpose other than as a dinky toy.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 12:40 PM on March 20 [7 favorites]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 12:40 PM on March 20 [7 favorites]
Dismantling Public Values, One Data Center at a Time:
In Sweden, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have claimed very high amounts of the capacity of electric grids to power the computers in their data centers. These grid capacities are much higher than actual use or need. The energy industry jargon calls this practice “air bookings” (luftbokningar). This means that a lot of the available capacity of a regional electricity grid is reserved by one actor who does not make use of it but keeps the booking indefinitely in order to enable its own further growth in a situation that the whole society needs more energy and particularly green electricity. It also means that the grid capacities reserved by Big Tech are someone else’s lost opportunity to connect to the grid. The immediate problem is that the Big Tech capacity reservations prevent development projects by local municipalities, industries, and households to come to fruition, and practically eliminate competitors — through curtailing access to electricity — and putting Big Tech companies in a position of informal monopolies over the available capacities in a grid in those regions where their data centers are establsihed. These two examples make the point:
– In Skåne, Microsoft booked so much electricity from the grid in the Malmö region that the local Swedish bread company Pågen could no longer build a bread baking factory in the area and had to expand elsewhere.
– In Sörmland, Amazon Web Services has reserved 1/4 of the capacity of the grid in the area of Katrineholm and is currently preventing other data center actors and more job-intense industries to come and establish their businesses. Today, AWS is the largest consumer of electricity in the region, followed – and not closely — by the largest chicken slaughter house in Sweden that slaughters 200 000 chicken per day.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:04 PM on March 20 [10 favorites]
In Sweden, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have claimed very high amounts of the capacity of electric grids to power the computers in their data centers. These grid capacities are much higher than actual use or need. The energy industry jargon calls this practice “air bookings” (luftbokningar). This means that a lot of the available capacity of a regional electricity grid is reserved by one actor who does not make use of it but keeps the booking indefinitely in order to enable its own further growth in a situation that the whole society needs more energy and particularly green electricity. It also means that the grid capacities reserved by Big Tech are someone else’s lost opportunity to connect to the grid. The immediate problem is that the Big Tech capacity reservations prevent development projects by local municipalities, industries, and households to come to fruition, and practically eliminate competitors — through curtailing access to electricity — and putting Big Tech companies in a position of informal monopolies over the available capacities in a grid in those regions where their data centers are establsihed. These two examples make the point:
– In Skåne, Microsoft booked so much electricity from the grid in the Malmö region that the local Swedish bread company Pågen could no longer build a bread baking factory in the area and had to expand elsewhere.
– In Sörmland, Amazon Web Services has reserved 1/4 of the capacity of the grid in the area of Katrineholm and is currently preventing other data center actors and more job-intense industries to come and establish their businesses. Today, AWS is the largest consumer of electricity in the region, followed – and not closely — by the largest chicken slaughter house in Sweden that slaughters 200 000 chicken per day.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:04 PM on March 20 [10 favorites]
A few thoughts on the energy side of this:
The main reason to be morally outraged at high electricity use is carbon, because carbon is an externality, doing damage unaccounted for in the cost of business. If you use as much energy as all the houses in the US, but all of that energy is coming from (say) geothermal sources, there's no carbon impact, and, I would argue, we shouldn't really care about the energy use aspect.
Something the article gets right is that there's a huge advantage to centralization in this space, if you care about the carbon. The bigger players are far more able to create better efficiencies and innovate on improvements at scale.
Weirdly, that citation link goes to an article about how bad reporting on data center energy use is, which AFAICT doesn't contain either of the statistics in the paragraph... (but does talk about how often publications over-estimate energy consumption and the tendency of the high-shock-value estimates to get widely circulated. and the tendency for improvements in efficiency to be routinely under-estimated and under-reported.) And one of the points made in that article is that energy usage doesn't scale linearly with usage, and has actually been pretty modest given the explosive growth of computation:
It's also worth taking a look at the World Bank report on data carbon footprint: "Despite rising electricity consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from data infrastructure have been flat since 2015, equivalent to 0.2 percent of the global total [...]. This is due to the rising share of renewables in the electricity mix used by data centers."
posted by kaibutsu at 2:04 PM on March 20 [5 favorites]
The main reason to be morally outraged at high electricity use is carbon, because carbon is an externality, doing damage unaccounted for in the cost of business. If you use as much energy as all the houses in the US, but all of that energy is coming from (say) geothermal sources, there's no carbon impact, and, I would argue, we shouldn't really care about the energy use aspect.
Something the article gets right is that there's a huge advantage to centralization in this space, if you care about the carbon. The bigger players are far more able to create better efficiencies and innovate on improvements at scale.
"Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions."So 85% of the carbon emissions are associated with the decentralized end-users. This is a clear argument to move as much compute into the cloud as possible... And the article points out that much of the dirty energy usage is due to smaller players working on dirtier regions of the grid.
Weirdly, that citation link goes to an article about how bad reporting on data center energy use is, which AFAICT doesn't contain either of the statistics in the paragraph... (but does talk about how often publications over-estimate energy consumption and the tendency of the high-shock-value estimates to get widely circulated. and the tendency for improvements in efficiency to be routinely under-estimated and under-reported.) And one of the points made in that article is that energy usage doesn't scale linearly with usage, and has actually been pretty modest given the explosive growth of computation:
"For example, the tremendous growth in the cloud data-center segment (which includes the world’s largest “hyperscale” data centers) has led some to predict massive future growth in global data-center energy use.17 Between 2010 and 2018, the workloads hosted by this segment increased by 2,600%, whereas its estimated electricity use increased by 500%. Despite the rapid growth of this segment, the global energy use of all data centers grew far more modestly, rising by less than 10%."Finally, at the end of the day, data centers are pretty well placed to switch to renewables, and that's exactly what you see in the big players: design of data centers to maximize renewable energy usage. (By contrast, it's much harder to switch the airline industry to geothermal power.) And this is how it's supposed to work: The basic global plan to deal with carbon emissions is to electrify everything and switch the grid over to renewables as quickly as possible. This removes the carbon externality systematically.
It's also worth taking a look at the World Bank report on data carbon footprint: "Despite rising electricity consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from data infrastructure have been flat since 2015, equivalent to 0.2 percent of the global total [...]. This is due to the rising share of renewables in the electricity mix used by data centers."
posted by kaibutsu at 2:04 PM on March 20 [5 favorites]
The thing with data centers and renewables is that the data centers are taking up all that new capacity. So, instead of all that non-carbon emitting energy production replacing carbon producing energy sources, crypto miners and AI woodchippers are co-opting it. So, the carbon emissions continue.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:09 PM on March 20 [11 favorites]
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:09 PM on March 20 [11 favorites]
Seconding that. It’s only okay to waste renewable energy if there’s no place that needs to substitute renewable for carbon-emitting energy. And we are far from that condition.
posted by clew at 3:19 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]
posted by clew at 3:19 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]
(Pedantic side note: compute is a verb, not a noun or adjective. At least to the best of my knowledge, and thus seeing it used as something other than a verb feels jarring and annoying. Yes, I know my feelings are my problem. But also language is about communication and communication is two-sided. In conclusion: descriptivist linguistics is a land of contrasts.)
posted by eviemath at 4:39 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 4:39 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]
The thing with data centers and renewables is that the data centers are taking up all that new capacity.
Is that what's happening, though? In the US, total electricity generation has been remarkably flat for the last fifteen years, with coal dropping rapidly and renewables taking up the slack. Total generative capacity is up about 20% since 2005, but actual generation is flat, and coal is decreasing as a share of generated energy. None of this looks like problems of excess demand... This is not what Jevon's paradox looks like.
Additionally, there's plenty of places where data centers have actually driven the creation of renewable energy economies. Think of, say, building a data center in Nebraska in 2015. The local government is as pro fossil fuel as it gets, but the builders have a renewable energy requirement, which leads to a lot of solar and wind being built out, which in turn means there's more local capacity to build more solar and wind in 2024.
(The Sweden problems sound like a bad set of regulations, rather than any actual energy shortage. And I'm really not going to cry about the chicken slaughterhouse...)
The point is this: When we talk about actual data centers, they are far more efficient than just about anything else using energy, and uncommonly well-suited to a world of renewable energy. They are also a tiny slice of total energy usage: you should stop driving cars before you stop charging your phone. And you should stop charging your phone before you stop using the cloud, because the cloud is gobs more efficient than your phone.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:02 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]
Is that what's happening, though? In the US, total electricity generation has been remarkably flat for the last fifteen years, with coal dropping rapidly and renewables taking up the slack. Total generative capacity is up about 20% since 2005, but actual generation is flat, and coal is decreasing as a share of generated energy. None of this looks like problems of excess demand... This is not what Jevon's paradox looks like.
Additionally, there's plenty of places where data centers have actually driven the creation of renewable energy economies. Think of, say, building a data center in Nebraska in 2015. The local government is as pro fossil fuel as it gets, but the builders have a renewable energy requirement, which leads to a lot of solar and wind being built out, which in turn means there's more local capacity to build more solar and wind in 2024.
(The Sweden problems sound like a bad set of regulations, rather than any actual energy shortage. And I'm really not going to cry about the chicken slaughterhouse...)
The point is this: When we talk about actual data centers, they are far more efficient than just about anything else using energy, and uncommonly well-suited to a world of renewable energy. They are also a tiny slice of total energy usage: you should stop driving cars before you stop charging your phone. And you should stop charging your phone before you stop using the cloud, because the cloud is gobs more efficient than your phone.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:02 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]
you should stop driving cars before you stop charging your phone. And you should stop charging your phone before you stop using the cloud, because the cloud is gobs more efficient than your phone.
Except that a car transports me from place to place, and enables making a living. And a phone enables me to talk to friends and family across the continent. While crypto does what? Fuel a bubble and launders crime proceeds? And what passes for AI just puts people out of work poorly.
posted by cfraenkel at 10:45 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]
Except that a car transports me from place to place, and enables making a living. And a phone enables me to talk to friends and family across the continent. While crypto does what? Fuel a bubble and launders crime proceeds? And what passes for AI just puts people out of work poorly.
posted by cfraenkel at 10:45 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]
Pedantic side note: compute is a verb, not a noun or adjective. At least to the best of my knowledge
"Compute" as a noun is shorthand for "computational capacity" or "computational power", and as such it's become more and more widely used in the field of cloud computing. Think of it as industry lingo.
posted by Umami Dearest at 3:03 AM on March 21 [9 favorites]
"Compute" as a noun is shorthand for "computational capacity" or "computational power", and as such it's become more and more widely used in the field of cloud computing. Think of it as industry lingo.
posted by Umami Dearest at 3:03 AM on March 21 [9 favorites]
What is this article talking about? I have worked with three of the largest power companies in the states and data centers. Theres no black box here. Data centers cluster around places with “boring infrastructure” like rail hubs that can deliver coal and also switch seamlessly to natural gas during power surges. Renewables simply can not do that though they can augment it. They also look for predictable weather patterns, low seismic activity and other things. Cloud is far from a black box, I worked in DCs starting in the early 2000s. I no longer do that but the concept remains the same. CRACs aren’t scary, all critical infrastructure has it.
My theory is that LLMs will move local and probably create more carbon issues more difficult to track. Right now there’s a huge push to reduce electric costs simply for economic reasons. Rather than renewables I’d rather see the EPA create more emission regulations. Even nuclear can’t scale when it’s 100 degrees and everyone turns on their AC.
The only black box is that big tech companies are the only one ones that can afford to gobble up GPUs. They have every reason to reduce electrical costs. I’m not defending these companies but they have a large incentive to decrease costs by even a few percentage points. I have no solutions other then we have technology to make non-renewables cleaner and we should focus on that.
posted by geoff. at 1:17 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]
My theory is that LLMs will move local and probably create more carbon issues more difficult to track. Right now there’s a huge push to reduce electric costs simply for economic reasons. Rather than renewables I’d rather see the EPA create more emission regulations. Even nuclear can’t scale when it’s 100 degrees and everyone turns on their AC.
The only black box is that big tech companies are the only one ones that can afford to gobble up GPUs. They have every reason to reduce electrical costs. I’m not defending these companies but they have a large incentive to decrease costs by even a few percentage points. I have no solutions other then we have technology to make non-renewables cleaner and we should focus on that.
posted by geoff. at 1:17 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]
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One thing I've noticed is that a lot of us spend a lot of time waiting for our work to be scheduled in a data center.
I'm starting to feel like my company should significantly restructure how we work, because too many of us want compute and we waste a lot of our time waiting for it.
posted by constraint at 2:29 AM on March 20 [5 favorites]