Agreed. A 7000 acre square building would be ~3.3 miles long on each side. I call BS. Also, you would cool electrical equipment with water in Alaska. You would need antifreeze or similar fluids in the frozen north.
I'm still puzzled over the stated need to cool with water. I surmise it is related to the high power utilization, but am still doubtful. Most computing equipment, by its nature, is well-cooled by airflow. Food canning operations have long ago perfected the art of massive, storehouse cooling by refrigeration, no water required. I would normally have considered Alaska (Anchorage & parts north) to be the "frozen north," but I guess I haven't seen the worst! (I've been in Anchorage during winter. You can drive on streets that are perfectly clear and well-lighted---but the walls of cleared snow on either side of the road are 20 feet high. You feel like a rat in a maze.)
I did a little reading on the data center complex being built near Abilene, Texas. They described what they were doing: constructing huge neural networks, with each neuron being tended to like a miniature computer in itself, for specific training and tasking. The picture became clear to me: they were attaining Artificial Intelligence by the most incredible scale of brute force operations. Which tells me that this will likely be superseded by more efficient methods, perhaps within a decade. I have no idea what such methods might be, but their present approach is like removing a hillside with an army of spade-workers carrying dirt in pails. I don't think it is "sustainable." Perhaps this will be leapfrogged by quantum computing.
But I get the picture that they are trying to pair up an eyeball and a larynx to think and talk, believing that massive pattern recognition / correlation and language translation is tantamount to conceptualization. I don't think it is. You might get an idiot-savant who drools and doesn't know how to use the toilet...
Agreed. A 7000 acre square building would be ~3.3 miles long on each side. I call BS. Also, you would cool electrical equipment with water in Alaska. You would need antifreeze or similar fluids in the frozen north.
I'm still puzzled over the stated need to cool with water. I surmise it is related to the high power utilization, but am still doubtful. Most computing equipment, by its nature, is well-cooled by airflow. Food canning operations have long ago perfected the art of massive, storehouse cooling by refrigeration, no water required. I would normally have considered Alaska (Anchorage & parts north) to be the "frozen north," but I guess I haven't seen the worst! (I've been in Anchorage during winter. You can drive on streets that are perfectly clear and well-lighted---but the walls of cleared snow on either side of the road are 20 feet high. You feel like a rat in a maze.)
I did a little reading on the data center complex being built near Abilene, Texas. They described what they were doing: constructing huge neural networks, with each neuron being tended to like a miniature computer in itself, for specific training and tasking. The picture became clear to me: they were attaining Artificial Intelligence by the most incredible scale of brute force operations. Which tells me that this will likely be superseded by more efficient methods, perhaps within a decade. I have no idea what such methods might be, but their present approach is like removing a hillside with an army of spade-workers carrying dirt in pails. I don't think it is "sustainable." Perhaps this will be leapfrogged by quantum computing.
But I get the picture that they are trying to pair up an eyeball and a larynx to think and talk, believing that massive pattern recognition / correlation and language translation is tantamount to conceptualization. I don't think it is. You might get an idiot-savant who drools and doesn't know how to use the toilet...