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Who would win
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
484 points (95.7% liked)
Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I don't think this is at all realistic.
Data centers have an entire staff of people who JUST design and operate the cooling systems. I can promise you, they monitor the condition of the water/coolant.
I spoke with an cooling engineer at great length tho worked in an AWS data center. They know when the water quality is below threshold, they cycle out the old water and replace with fresh on an ongoing basis.
If there were some type of contaminant in the water, it'd probably set off a bunch of alerts pretty fast. Even still, most of the cooling systems are made of copper or aluminum. Neither would be damaged by salt in any meaningful way.
Some acids would corrode copper and aluminum, but it's not like it would happen fast at anything but extreme concentrations.
So you are saying, there are humans in these facilities we could target to disable those systems?
They decided to work for the clankers. They chose to be targets.
Well a data center itself does not exclusively host the computing infrastructure used for ai.
The components that run Lemmy live in a data center. The EFF hosts their content from a data center. Telecommunications that make up the internet host equipment in data centers.
I thought we were talking specifically about recently built data centers for majority use by AI companies
They typically don't just build 'em for AI. Data centers are general purpose buildings. They provide power, cooling, security, floorspace. What goes into 'em doesn't change anything. You can stuff computers in there that are used for cancer research, cryptomining, AI, ecommerce, it doesn't matter.