Do We Really Need a Billion Copies of The Mona Lisa on the Cloud?
Putting the Brakes on the Data Center Train
By Bruce Saller
ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
Individuals and businesses are using data centers more and more as we increase our use of artificial intelligence and data storage. The data center boom has generated lots of construction jobs and brings significant tax revenue to the communities where they are located. However, in addition to their noise, air pollution, and water use issues, their boom has upended the power generation industry, resulting in our electric bills increasing 50 percent since 2022. These increases are likely to continue for at least another decade until the generation industry can catch up. These higher rates are making Virginia less attractive to the business community, as well as making residential users pay more than $600 per year in higher electricity bills.
My personal data storage use ballooned in the last few years from 40 billion bytes to 1,100 billion bytes without my requesting any increase. My operating system yearly fee now includes 300 billion bytes of storage, and my cable provider replaced my Digital Video Recorder with a wireless system which includes 760 billion bytes of storage. (For an extra $10 per month I can have 3,000 billion bytes.) This “free” storage leads to wasteful habits. I’ve seen lots of people take pictures of every painting in a museum.
Do we really need a billion copies of The Mona Lisa on the cloud? Or 50,000 pictures from our vacations? Or pictures of every meal we eat out?
A new law requires higher rates for businesses (i.e. data centers) that use more than 25 million watts of electricity to pay for their generation and distribution upgrades. This change doesn’t go far enough, though, as it doesn’t take into account the higher power-generator and fuel costs we’re paying due to the additional data center demand. The answer: Increase data center electric rates until our rates return to what they would have been without data centers—around 10 cents per kilowatt hour vs 15 cents today.
Here are some other ideas:
· Require software operating system vendors to provide a low-cost option without any storage, and have higher rates for storage options.
· Limit the free data storage for social media accounts to 20 billion bytes or less. Most are currently unlimited.
· Change search engines to default to a non-artificial-intelligence search—so they perform artificial intelligence searches only when commanded (e.g. “AI entry”).
Hopefully by increasing their costs and reducing demand we can slow the data center train.
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Bruce Saller is a retired systems engineer with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.