Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
Wouldn't that be even worse in terms of NIMBYism?
1. Every single municipality would have AI data center "hosting in your municipality".
2. You'd have to majorly overbuild every municipality's capacity, as usage would likely have peak hours and 'dead' hours each day based on work, sleep, etc. if usage is local to that municipality.
> several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
Are you saying you believe already-built data centers are 100 times (2 orders of magnitude) as much as needed? I presume this is not what you think will actually happen in the real world though?
2. Yes. That's already the case. Today a single smartphone has enough CPU/RAM to host email services for many thousands of users. A single Netflix OCA 2U serves 400Gbit/s of video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738
The only reason we had huge DCs before LLMs was so Google/Facebook could spread their surveillance/adtech empire. Nothing of that scale is needed to provide useful services to end users.
Framasoft, the biggest non-profit host (a french FLOSS/education NGO) serves millions of users with dozens of services on 68 servers and 800TB storage: https://framapiaf.org/@Framasoft/115767718097945194