Spyke

Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

These "makeshift" structures are housing hardware that costs millions of dollars in total.

"Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation."

Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for powerhttps://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-putting-up-tents-across-the-us-to-house-ai-servers-like-a-scene-out-of-the-movie-mad-max-structures-take-three-months-to-build-and-use-jet-engines-for-powerOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
discuss.tchncs.de

Millions and Millions $$$ in hardware, all in light structures, in rural areas without much police presence you say?

Interesting.

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Agent641reply
lemmy.world

Rocket artillery is surprisingly easy to make at home, if you have enough potassium nitrate and PVC pipe

12

I have wondered about that. What kind of range can you get DIY? I guess if you did fire something they could try to do physics to figure out where it came from, but you'd hopefully be long gone by then.

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wabafeereply
lemmy.world

That amount of millions can feed the crackheads for generations.

6
piefed.social

Help me understand again how there isn’t enough wealth in this world to give everyone healthcare, shelter, and enough food not to starve?

We are providing housing camps for AI infrastructure, and AI is nothing more than an idea. Meanwhile the suffering of all life on the planet just goes on because a few monkeys just decided this is the way?

121
notgoldreply
aussie.zone

Homeless don't earn the tech overlords money and they keep the general populace knowing where they could be. It's bullshit that we give these cunts rope rather than just hanging them ourselves.

22

The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showin' up at those jobs.

— George Carlin

6

Maybe there needs to be a rebellion not against government but the real overlords…

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lemmy.ml

USA spends more on healthcare than countries with socialised healthcare.

10

And yet it only goes to very few people. When they don’t pay for basic preventative care, the more complicated issues grow in cost in such a way as to outweigh their “savings”.

The US is a country that believes that not paying your rent or replacing the batteries in the smoke detector is a fantastic way to save money. Joke country.

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lemmy.ml

It proves having socialised healthcare would be more cost effective. But shareholders.

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lemmy.world

Uses jet engines for power?

Welp. Guess we know what happened to the old Spirit Airlines fleet.

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myrmidexreply
belgae.social

This is fairly common I think. In Belgium it's one of the back-up plans in case of power shortage. (article)

20

Not very common. Those engines are 50 years old and are only powered up a few times per year to stabilize the power grid as they can quickly scale up and down in contrast to nuclear, wind and solar.

Most countries do not use them as they are only about 30% efficient and loud. A modern gas power plant can reach double that efficiency.

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lemmy.world

so much waste. why bother flying in your personal jet to burn the world down when you can just leave it idling on the ground?

4

Idling? What makes you think that these things won't be running at full blast 24/7?

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mkwtreply
lemmy.world

It's pretty common for natural gas electric plants to use Brayton cycle turbines, which is the same thermodynamic cycle that the turbojet engines on airplanes use. But you can optimize the designs on the ground for efficiency (and zero thrust) instead of thrust-to-weight.

It's also common to use "combined cycle" technology which mashes the Brayton cycle engine together with an older-style steam loop for extra efficiency.

After reading the article, I think they're just saying they installed some miniaturized natural gas plants. I don't think they're literally running aircraft engines on the ground.

4

There's at least one company that does tweak (iirc used) airliner turbofans by taking the fan part off so they just have the turbojet (which is already tuned to mostly generate rotational energy to drive the fan turbine rather than produce thrust itself) and use that to spin a generator. Obviously, it's a bit more complicated than that in reality, but there are quite a lot of old engines no longer certified for flight out of an abundance of caution but that still work fine, and a market for high-power generators that don't need to be the pinnacle of efficiency (originally as backups just for occasional use, and now because of AI companies caring only about speed and not about cost).

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Either way, I bet they are "cut-able" and have lots of expensive metals inside

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lemmy.world

Zuckerberg FOMO, at his finest.

Even among tech bros, it really is amazing how insecure he is.

55

jet engines

AI

How to burn endless amounts of fuel in order to make more noise than sense 😁

53

Those servers have better housing than the ICE kidnapping victims

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startrek.website

As if they expect the servers to be obsolete long before the fabric roof

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notgoldreply
aussie.zone

Was thinking this too. They probably won't even relocate them as it's more efficient to put in the newest gear in their new facility

6

Yeah, probably won't even dismantle it, just bulldoze this 10 billion dollars into a pit and bury the lot. Then go spend another 10 billion on a shiny new tent+compute

12

They rolled poorly on their "x thing in real life is like y dystopian art piece" dice

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Catoblepasreply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

I suppose Mad Max was also about people living with a lack of government oversight, allowing the powerful to do as they please.

21

Need to make it sound apocalyptic somehow to draw the clicks.

10

I guess calling it „Agriculture in Spain“ didn‘t have the same ring to it but believe me it‘s almost as dystopian.

1

Let the homeless move in and use the hardware as they see fit. They deserve dignity and epic LAN parties

32
lemmy.world

Please stop using AI, please.

If you're required to use AI for your job, then sabotage the efforts.

I beg of you.

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I have been, by focusing on enabling team members to use it exactly like how leadership wants. You want them to use more AI? Okay… they need Agentic harnesses that can do work for them locally. They need MacBook Pros to run the models. They need cloud keys to test different frontier models for different loads. They need governance, observability, repeatability, scheduling, human-in-the-loop…

I’m going to show them that anyone can build a bridge, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely works. On top of that, I’m going to show them that they’re wrong in believing they want a bridge. All it should take is seeing that they got exactly what they wanted without getting anything that they wanted.

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feddit.org

Pure wishful thinking like this is just as useful as thoughts and prayers.

This is a overhyped technology just like the internet was before the dotcom bubble popped.

The best you can hope for is for the AI bubble to burst and then see what AI is like when it normalises.

Because to think this technology will just go away is going to end the same way as for the people who said the internet is just a temporary fad.

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excralreply
feddit.org

When the dot com bubble bursted, the typical internet speed was 56k modem speed and cellular internet practically didn't exist. At that point the internet still needed years of exponential technological advancement to allow for stuff like streaming amd mobile services. The difference with the AI bubble is that they try to brute force their way out of infancy by throwing ludicrous amounts of money, energy and other recources at it instead of waiting for the much needed technological progress

8

While everyone had 56k modems, they laid millions of miles of finer optic cable. That sounds like brute forcing to me. Most of it laid there dark for 20 years.

3

Then 9/11 happened and suddenly we have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth competed with infrared before it dominated. Bluetooth's wlan not getting good is still sad to me.

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Joelk111reply
lemmy.world

I've been cruising with the most expensive model at work for a while now. After github's pricing model change they finally asked us to be more conscious about which model we're using (which was hilarious after we were constantly asked to use more AI), but eh, it's easier to just leave it on Claude 4.8. I figure eventually the costs will catch up with the company.

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boonhetreply
sopuli.xyz

Make sure to use max reasoning for better results!

3

It's not even necessary. It will come down on its own. Recent reportings in my company says we've increased our productivity by 10℅ while the number of defects rose by 40℅. And the cost increases with every month. It's unsustainable.

2

Has there been an environmental study in these makeshift camps? If these were homeless, we’d placate drug use, bulldoze them to vacate the camps. What. The. Fuck.

27

Yeah, this seems more like what you see on the outskirts of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077; Mad Max people live in caves or rusted scrap structures and don't even have computers aside from really smart dwarves.

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lemmy.world

I watched the Mad Max movies. This looks absolutely not like anything in them.

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I've seen Mad Max and I'm going to disagree. This looks LITERALLY EXACTLY LIKE MAD MAX to me and you can't diminish that, because it's entirely subjective. But also correct. The resemblance is uncanny.

2

I also am a qualified expert on what does and doesn't look like mad max, and I concur.

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lemmy.zip

10's of millions of dollars in rural areas , I wonder how they protect all that from large groups of angry people...

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its a good thing there isnt a cost of living crisis or people might think all that copper was valuble

14
lemmy.world

God this page is mobile cancer, even with an adblocker

12

Yup, Tom's is the last of the originals still running (HardOCP, anandtech and sharkyexteme are all gone), but it's absolutely a garbage site now.

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lemmy.world

Might be the same structure, but Meta confirms they're doing exactly this:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially.

1
lemmy.hogru.ch

I think you misunderstood, i thought it funny that meta is putting expensive GPUs into what amounts to chicken coops. Not that the article was wrong and there's actual chickens inside

3

m b c cz ::"cvs cc NVを、!。、、。を!、。、、、、!、!、、???

Edit: protip, lock your phone before putting it in your pocket.

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Meta hires enough veterans and enough of their employees are also in the Reserves and National Guard to explain to them exactly why they shouldn't do this.

8

The following tornado is brought to you by your AI-enhanced human-induced climate crisis – Now also hitting your local AI-datacenters

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lemmy.zip

All funded with Facebook and Instagram and a touch of glasses and oculus.

Things so easy to simply not use and even with this evidence of how shitty they are (nevermind the ability to shift politics) people won't quit.

We are all fucked.

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aussie.zone

The products are addictive like gambling. That’s why they are loosing court cases now. People can’t stop even if they want to.

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thejmlreply
sh.itjust.works

'Eh, I stopped about 8yrs ago. Wasn't that hard. Highly recommended, btw.

All you have to do is make sure MFA is on, log off and never go back. Then delete the apps, of course.

1

And I stopped smoking at 13. There are gamblers, drug users and others that can’t stop but if you aren’t in that situation it’s hard to understand how hard it is. Deleting the apps is a must like not having junk food in the house if you are trying to loose weight.

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OVH started putting up data centers made with wood and cheap materials in Europe. They had a major fire at one of them.

Half assed designs have their own issues.

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feddit.it

So, I hear there's a bunch of unused office space due to work-from-home, is it really lacking that much power?

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thejmlreply
sh.itjust.works

Yes... and the ability to deal with super densely packed rack weight.

Like seriously, they can't use existing empty data center space because the floors aren't built to deal with ones that tightly packed of equipment.

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thejmlreply
sh.itjust.works

I'd assume the density is much lower here. They don't have to resort to cramming as much together since they can just throw up another tent. They're also likely putting them right on the ground instead of worrying about the Nice raised floors for permanent cabling and other niceties.

I'm just wondering how they deal with cooling.

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Can you imagine what a hellish environment this would be to work in? And what are the odds that they are cooling the interior of the tents to anything that is not hellishly hot?

2

So... if using office space for data centers, they just need to lower the server density until it's compatible with the unused office space's capacity.... like our old unused K-Marts and grocery stores become halloween haunted houses...

2

That office space is in cities that won't let them steal all the water and power and then dump pollution into the water supply.

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fakereply
sh.itjust.works

Not unusual in the slightest. They're often used as peaking plants that fire up when energy prices are driven high enough by demand. Can be setup to run on all sorts of different fuels.

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bennyreply
reddthat.com

This isn't for power peaks, it's for a temporary data center. There is nothing usual about it.

2

If these are supposed to be used as backup generators then gas turbines are a good fit in technical sense. Can start quickly, don't need a lot of space or cooling, can work on partial load; lead times are somehow short, and you can just pack it all in containers and set up anywhere which seems to be important. The catch is that efficiency is probably just below 40% instead of 60% and slightly above for regular CCGT plant, thst is you need to burn extra 50%-ish gas (methane is cheapest fuel and can just be piped). about anything that burns and can be pumped through a nozzle can be used

Then there's matter of smog. You're supposed to put giant catalytic converter (sorta) on this thing and normal powerplants do just that. Apparently techbro oligarchs decided it's not disruptive enough this way

but dw this won't last, talking about bubble broke to the mainstream now

3

Here's an idea: cut all the RTO orders and retrofit all those useless offices into data centers. No one wants to live in the city or suburbs anyways.

2