this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
869 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
87302 readers
3303 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Usable quantum computing will annihilate the need for these data centres. They'll be defunct within a decade. The earth will be worse off and the money laundering that they provide will move elsewhere. Fuck this timeline.
Sorry to burst your bubble but DC’s aren’t going anywhere. Even if we are in a position to make quantum computers commercially available in the next 10 years they’ll still need to be housed somewhere, powered, cooled and connected.
Besides, quantum computers are great at complex calculations and simulations but you wouldn’t use them to host a website or a VPS. They’ll be hideously expensive so will only be used for the specific workloads that they excel at and everything else will done with the same servers we have now.
AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don't require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.
Neural nets and LLMs are not doing complex math, they're doing very large amounts of simple math. Quantum computing is probably not going to accelerate our current NN tech.
This is why GPUs are excellent for AI applications, they are built around the goal of doing large amount of pixel shader computations, which is pretty simple math. You could do the math to shade a pixel by hand, for example.
What are you talking about? Qubits are almost perfect for this sort of prediction algorithm.
Fair enough, I didn’t realise they were so different from traditional DC’s.
They shouldn't be. One of the issue the sheer size and volume, they're being built based only on speculation not actual need (all the ssd/ram/gpu are sitting in warehouses waiting for these DC to be built — if they're fabricated at all). They're also being built where it's cheap, not where they would be needed (industrial and urban areas) just to save money, externalize costs, and avoid regulations.
They're not servers. It's just gpus. It's not really a data center, basically the same as bitcoin mining.
They're still servers, the focus is on the GPU side though. A single DGX B300 has 8 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 2 Xeon 6776P CPUs. And networking, RAM, storage. Consumes 14 kilowatts and looks like this
You COULD host a website on one if you wanted to. You'd be stupid to do it, but you could.
Sure, sure... Host them in space, built from privately mined asteroids and powered by fusion!!!