it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage.

You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.

All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.

No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.

I don’t know why you’re phrasing it like it’s not a big deal that these juggernauts are attempting to make themselves indispensable.

Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals.

Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).

Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.

How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks.

I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.

¹https://solidproject.org/

People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it.