The Blip Report for Wednesday, June 5th 2024

data centers and cybercrimes

I read a story that by the 2030, data centers are going to be using more and more of the electricity that’s generated in the USA - ‘Data Centers Set to Consume 9% of U.S. Electricity by 2030’, and that’s because of new power-hungry technologies.

“Early ChatGPT searches typically consumed 10x the amount of power used by Google search, with that figure set to rise. AI tasks typically demand much more powerful hardware than traditional computing tasks.”

Just to meet the demand of the data centers, they’ll need about 47 GW of additional generating capacity. That’s an awful lot of windmills and sunbeam catchers to build. But I think they said that they need reliable power, so it will come from increased use of natural gas [i.e. lots more fracking!]

And that’s not counting the additional electricity needed for when they make us all drive an expensive electric car, since we’re not allowed to drive inexpensive electric cars made in China, like the BYD ‘Seagull’.

In fact I read a story about BYD (Build Your Dreams) hybrid cars - ‘BYD Puts The Final Nail In The Internal Combustion Only Car's Coffin’, that with its 5th generation technology, their new hybrid cars can have a maximum range of 2100 km! While Chinese cars will be in high demand in most countries in the world, the other countries’ car manufacturers will be left fighting over a stagnating US market.

But then I read a story that people aren’t buying small electric cars anyway - ‘Global sales of polluting SUVs hit record high in 2023, data shows’, and that half of all new car sales are SUVs, (apparently it’s a status symbol thing), and that even half of new electric car sales were SUVs too - and that those electric SUVs need bigger batteries, and that means more electricity too.

But getting back to the data centers, then I read a story about where all these data centers are located - in Northern Virginia - ‘Barriers To Entry’, .

“In the US, the state of Virginia became the Mecca for data centers, hosting facilities for some of the biggest names in tech, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and giants in the financial industry including Visa, Bank Of America, and Capital One, along with many other businesses.”

But there was a fascinating story about an energy company, Talen Energy, that sold its data center to Amazon. Talen also owns a nuclear power plant nearby, and so, as part of the sale of its data center, Amazon agreed to purchase 960 MW of power from Talen’s nuclear plant - at a fixed rate for ten years!!! aahhh … but that means that:

“The Talen deal effectively removes up to 1 GW of reliable capacity from the public market … Taking 1 GW of reliable power offline isn’t a problem, if we could build and have steady revenue streams for cheap reliable plants.

However, once those barriers to cheap power plants are set up [i.e. EPA’s ridiculous rules] … independent power plants are not necessarily obligated to sell power to the grid. Surviving reliable power plants may be incentivized to (effectively) exit the public grid and instead sell a portion or all of their power directly to data centers or other large customers.

Yikes! data centers could get guaranteed electricity, but then the public only gets what’s left!!!

And then I read a story about another big user of our electricity, cybercrime - ‘How Much Money Is Lost To Cybercrime?’, and that last year $12.5 Billion was lost to cybercrime in the United States, and that’s only what was reported, so it probably is much higher than that. And that $12.5 Billion that was lost, came from over 500,000 complaints. And so, if that’s all that was reported, there must have been many times more attempts at cybercrime. And all that cybercrime would require a lot of computers and a lot electricity too, I would think.

And then a little birdie asked me, how much of the data centers electricity usage comes from cybercrime? Hmmm…

and is that expected to increase to 9% of the country’s economy, as well? Hmmm…

and does cybercrime count towards the GDP? Hmmm…

and will cybercrime companies be listed on the stock markets? Hmmm…

Just asking, for my feathered friend.

Have fun. un-cyberly.