I think you've vastly underestimated how much digital media people consume...

But setting that aside, there are real efficiency wins from scale. I am a self-hoster, I have a fleet of machines I manage with Nix, I run local LLMs and do real work on consumer gaming hardware, i'm a huge fan of federated and distributed peer systems. I am 100% for that. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. And I'm saying we also need the gigantic warehouses. Absolutely.

The issue is zoning and environmental concerns and the effect on communities and strain on public infrastructure. All issues worsened by the AI boom and incentivized by capitalism.

There's a way to do datacenters right and its been done before. You just need legislation and enforcement. The problem isn't datacenters: the problem is that the same people putting up datacenters are the same people who own your politicians

Everyone hosting their services on their own hardware is the web infrastructure equivalent of getting everyone to smelt pig iron in their backyards. Some amount of datacentres are necessary for the functioning of a modern internet.
The problems we're seeing at the moment are a result of artificially inflated demand driven by AI bullshit disrupting supply lines of hardware that could actually be useful to people, the lack of environmental planning, and the condescending refusal by datacentre builders to engage with the reasons communities are opposed to their projects.

We already did that and the early internet was wildly power inefficient and unreliable. I'd rather have a million websites in one DC than a million server closets splattered all over the planet.

This post brought to you by this DC:

Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.

I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.

Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.

Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever.

I'm not trusting the average person to not let it turn into a botnet.

The average person, but not the average (non AI) business.

There's no way I could take our R7725s with dual 300 watt threadrippers and fit that in a shoe box. And we're a small company.

Sure, we could do that. But we'd need even more computer hardware that we don't have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there'd be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.

Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it's in a data center.

I say this as someone who's super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn't care about that I'd be paying for API access instead.