[K-Dog]

substack.com • 2026-05-24

Hyperscale Data Centers

What's the end game here?

"If you have been led to believe wind and solar are making a significant contribution, think again. Fossil fuels are their primary source and sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg whose products provenly harm the mental health of our children has proposed a data center the size of Manhattan."

Capitalism is fertile soil for Jevons paradox.

And Mark Zuckerberg is a capitalist. A rentier capitalist. Money for nothing. Use what he owns and pay him is the way he wants things to work out.

Wouldn't it be nice if you got a check in the mail, as a small percentage of something sold or a service rendered. You never have to do any work to get it, the check just comes. In America it takes living many years on this earth to understand that what you are doing is a theft. It should be obvious, but American culture gets in the way of this understanding. Zuckerberg will never have that understanding. To destroy the earth for unearned riches is an obvious evil. However many Americans cannot see the obvious.

Data centers are a speculative bubble feeding on itself. Capital is raised and the people raising this capital get paid today. Opaque metrics let raisers of capital sell potential capacity and build massive campuses. Transparency makes selling difficult. The AI buildout results from investor storytelling and rentier incentives, not actual verified necessity.

[RE]

The AI buildout results from investor storytelling and rentier incentives, not actual verified necessity.

Pretty much ever since the invention of the Wheel, the story of Homo Saps has been about inventing things that would make their lives easier and at first glance improve the way they lived, but none of them were truly necessary for living.  All of them, even the wheel have negative conssequences and/or reqired other things to make them really useful.  Wheels needed Roads which had to be built and maintained, which required people doing those jobs rather than hunting or farming.  The society grows in numbers and complexity and becomes dependent on the roads to function.  What once wasn't necessary for living now has become so; this is the principle of irreversibility which comes along with complexity in the growth of a civilization.

Combining this with the concept of Private Ownership is what allows some people to become outrageously rich. it has nothing to do with hard work.  Way back when of course you couldn't Patent a wheel and you didn't need a big factory, anybody could make a simple one.  Eventually of course it was improved on, Wheelwrights became an occupation, factories for making wheels with metal and rubber arrived and chemical plants that made synthetic rubber, etc etc etc.  More complexity, ownership of the means of production again makes a tiny minority wealthy because the society has become dependent on these high tech wheels with synthetic polymer tires which are made from Oil, also "owned" by whoever was powerful enough to take control of the land the oil was under.

AI is no different, it's not yet necessary, but is quickly becoming so.  Will it really improve the human condition?  I doubt it, but making it necessary will definitely make whoever has control over it extremely wealthy.  Or really just wealthier, since it's the same people who own everything else who have the money to invest in building Data Centers.

For the individual, the less dependent you are on all these accessories to living, the freer you are.  That is why there are still people like Eustace Conway around and groups like the Amish.  They give up the conveniences of techno living in favor of having more freedom.  If everyone was like this, capitalism wouldn't succeed.  Unfortunately, most people are willing to trade their freedom and independence for toaster ovens and smart TVs.

RE

[K-Dog]

For the individual, the less dependent you are on all these accessories to living, the freer you are.

In terms of AI my personal decision is Knowledge Will Set Me Free.  Diner central will soon be running on a new motherboard.  I built the bones which carry this flesh ten years ago, and now it is time for a new machine.

I have been dabbling with my own AI.

This motherboard is the perfect platform for more experiments.  Totally premium, and it is in a box behind me.

The days of the hobbyist computer is ending as component cost driven by AI demand is now out of range of the average consumer.  The memory needed for this motherboard is ECC server RAM (error correcting)  the price has quadrupled (x4) in recent months, and there is no way for prices to fall as long as the AI bubble exists.  The memory 128GB is in another box, and it cost so much that the motherboard was able to be had at a substantial discount because the data center memory needed for it to run costs so much.

A hard core nerd core of hobbyists will remain.  But the days of an average guy building their own computer are over.

The key thing about the new machine besides having several times the power the current machine has is that all four of the card slots have full capability.  This puppy can run four video cards at once.  The PCIe slots are all full width.  And if a billionaire joins the Diner and donates $18,000.00 for two RTX6000's, the Diner will use them.  The power supply is 1650 watts supplying ample room for 4GPU cards.

Whenever I build a computer I quickly become aware of prices and where they are going.  I find a good price for every item I buy.  Sales of components have fallen through the floor because the high prices for memory devices means that sales are now a fraction of what has supported the hobby market up to now.  Building your own computer has doubled in price and most people will happily get what big brother wants them to get when the price doubles.  The golden age of the custom computer is over.

This board has the reputation of being the most returned.  Nothing wrong with the board but it is not well understood.  It can host a few Threadripper processors and if you do not get a 'pro' you can't use all the memory slots.  Which is actually fine since the non-pro processor only has 4 memory channels anyway.  But not everybody checks things out and they can't live with dead slots.  Which are not really dead if you have a pro.  Which I do. 16GB x 8.

What I did not want to live without is the bottom slot running at GEN 4 speed.  I wanted them all GEN 5.  Selecting the right processor also takes care of that issue.  The board supports what you give it, and I got the minimum high end Threadripper that lets the motherboard go whole hog.

energyskeptic.com • 2026-05-19

Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil

Motherboards get very little respect in the computing press as compared to other components. They are perpetually the team player and not the star of the show, and are generally priced as such.

[RE]

Hopefully your new hardware can stop the spammers.

RE