Gotcha, wasn't thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain't got shit on our authoritarian future.

Haven't seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?

The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It's an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I'm missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?

Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it's running. Text slop requires negligible storage.

Increased competition from open source alternatives harms competitiveness? By forcing them to compete and maybe actually innovate?

You can fuck right off back to the FSB with that misinformation.

https://proton.me/blog/is-signal-safe

Encryption not open source or auditable, encryption not enabled by default, entire platform captured by Russian oligarchs years ago. It is as secure as people sending all of their private messages to me to pass along to their contacts, and me saying "trust me bro, I won't look".

Hello, fellow Thunder aficionado