Open source datacenters and open source thinking will undo self-inflicted DC damage

It's hard to make big sheds symbols of oppression, but the datacenter industry's having a jolly good crack at it. Its big boxes of semi-sentient sand are increasingly seen as satanic sandcastles, environmental disasters that inflict drought while boiling oceans. Their role as dark cathedrals of the equally demonic AIs has done nothing to soften attitudes. A new contract of candour is needed between those who build datacenters and those who despise them. Shrugging off concerns, or offering shiny misdirections with no intent of following through, no longer works. Take energy. Without numbers that can be trusted, it's impossible to judge the environmental effect of using datacenters. How much energy does it take to ask Claude to write a limerick or a database? Who knows. TThere are wildly differing estimates, but nothing reliable enough to inform personal choices or public policy on ethical use. We need to know this not just in broad terms, but with enough accuracy and currency to differentiate between models and hardware generations. The only source of data good enough for this purpose is the datacenter operator. Without that cooperation, nobody's going to believe that anything other than a mad dash for gigawatts at any cost is powering build-out decisions. Given projects such as Musk's xAI Colossus clusters in the Deep South, energized by methane-burning turbines installed with scant regard for regulatory permission, the industry can hardly expect the benefit of the doubt. Lots of lawsuits, though. Then there's the tendency to wave at future nuclear power – and even fusion – as though it excuses burning hydrocarbons today. Nuclear power may eventually shoulder some of the load, but many of the projects now being promoted will not deliver electricity for years. Fusion will be outperformed by slide rules for longer still. This is not an answer to the immediate consequences of the build-out. Meanwhile, we've had pious platitudes that AI is going to get so good it will design itself out of environmental damage. Seen much sign of that lately? Then there's the sector's on-off involvement with genuine innovation. Take the possibilities of marine datacenters powered by tidal and wave generators. The oceans offer abundant cooling and energy, with the tides driven by the gravitational interaction of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Tidal power in particular is cosmically reliable; we know what the tides will be doing hundreds of years in advance. Seawater is not an ideal coolant, being corrosive and jellyfish-infested, but marine engineers have spent more than a century learning how to work around such problems. As for wave power, there's a lot going on below the radar, although don't wait to hear about it from the big guys. Panthalassa is building wave generators that look disturbingly and fittingly like the spaceship Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know, the home of the most famously insane AI in fiction. The 85-metre structure floats vertically, with a spherical section bobbing at the surface and a long tubular tail extending down through the water column. Wave motion forces internally recirculated water through a turbine, generating electricity for AI hardware inside a sealed, seawater-cooled container. It is designed to operate without anchors, subsea cables or a physical connection to land, avoiding some of the complexity of conventional offshore energy projects. As part of a floating datacenter, it's envisioned that connectivity would be via satellites. Given that orbital networks spend so much of their time over the open oceans populated by sea life notoriously reluctant to spend money on connectivity, this is no bad idea. Floating data farms could also be towed for maintenance or replacement rather than launched into orbit and abandoned. In every way, this is a saner idea than orbiting datacenters. An industry that saw itself as compatible with humans would be pushing harder at floating on water than floating in space. It isn't, because it isn't. Instead, it's operating on the edge of sanity, planning orgasmic overspend on throwing up as much infrastructure as it can as fast as it can, while uttering piteous "stop us before we kill again" pleadings as it struggles to deal with what it has become. This toxic mix of uncontrolled spending, buyer's remorse, misdirection, and HAL 9000 levels of non-alignment with keeping people alive is sharpening concern about environmental damage into activism. By the time the fossil fuel industry was firmly established in the public consciousness as a principal cause of climate change, it had a century of inertia behind it and was woven deeply into the global economy. AI is still groggily emerging from the egg, and it is vulnerable. While it's hard to turn misgivings into action against the global services and strategies of big AI, datacenters are local and vulnerable to local people and local politics. For anyone organizing opposition to AI amid dysfunctional national leadership, datacenters offer an obvious local target. For all the cack-handedness of the industry in perceiving this as a threat, let alone the actual responsibilities in force-feeding a trillion-dollar build-out into the ecosystem, some of us still want long-term, sustainable progress in more and better datacenters supporting more and better computational amplification of human potential. What's happening now is not the way to get there. Inasmuch as there's a datacenter culture – and there is; you could get everyone who makes the decisions that matter into a medium-sized Comic-Con – it needs to adopt radical openness. An open source datacenter is hard to imagine in an industry devoted to hiding its paranoia behind deception, but the same could be said of the mid-90s software sector. Among its very many other benefits, openness builds honesty, and honesty builds trust, and that more than any rare earth or process tweak is the element the AI industry needs most right now. By laying open the calculations and structure behind datacenter engineering, and being open about the decisions shaping the future, more and better options will appear. Participation makes allies; exclusion, enemies. On current evidence, the enemies are growing fast. Get open, get honest, or go home. ®