This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI.
I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.
I've run an Openstack cloud. Local to the host NVME's directly attached to VMs is unbeatable. All clouds offer this. But that storage is ephemeral and it was when I implemented it in Openstack too.
There's not enough redundancy. You could raid1 those NVME's when before they get attached to a VM and that helps with hardware failures, but you get less of them to attach. Even if you RAID them, there's not a good way to move that VM to another host if there's a RAM or CPU or other hardware issue on that host.
These VM's with NVME's directly attached have to basically be treated as bare metal servers and you have to do redundancy at the application layer (like database replication).
But again, all of the major cloud services offer these types of machines if you NEED NVME IO speed. There are quirks though. For example, in Azure it seems like you have to be able to expect the VM to be moved whenever Azure feels like it and expect that ephemeral data to be wiped. Whereas in Openstack, we would do local block level migrations if we HAD to move the VM to another host. That block level migration required the VM to be turned off but it did copy the local NVME data to another host. If this happened it was all planned and the particular application had app level redundancy built in so it was not a problem. If the host crashed, that particular VM would just be down till the host was fixed and came back online.
Yes it's hypocritical to push customers to pay you more money with best practices for uptime when you yourself don't follow them and your choices to not follow them actually make the best practices you pushed your customers to pay you more money for not fully work.
Hey! Pay us more money so when us-east-1 goes down you're not down (actually you'll still go down because us-east-1 is a single point of failure even for our other regions).
There's multiple single points of failure for their entire cloud in us-east-1.
I think it's hypocritical for them to push customers to double or triple their spend in AWS when they themselves have single points of failure on a single region.
Yeah because Amazon engineers are hypocrites. They want you to spend extra money for region failover and multi-az deploys but they don't do it themselves.
Google already has the ad network. They already have Gemini. IMO this will end up being OpenAI proving that the revenue model works and then Google will swoop in and take their market share away.
PlanetScale created a business and profited off of an open source product called vitess from Google which is why they originally only supported mysql. Would love for them to open source their solution for postgres.
I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.