You’re correct about the costs. My main point is that data centers are not necessary for you and me to get around on the web. They will be used to store information that can be used for marketing. That information will be quite valuable. I know from my work experience that demographic data is expensive.
Now next question: where will the data come from? If it's about mining social media data, that data is already stored somewhere (i.e. the servers of Facebook, TikTok, etc.). The same with CCTV data, tax data, etc.
So my question, similar to your sentiment, is why the need to build so many large mega data centers if the data is already effectively stored somewhere? With a career in back-end data processing, what little data analysis I've done has sometimes had preliminary results stored in temporary tables (thus the need for new storage) to keep from having to repeatedly mine old data to retrieve relevant data for new analyses. But IMHO the many large data centers seem to exceed that.
I don’t understand what’s going on with data centers.
We’ve been hearing a lot about data centers, and about community opposition to them, because they supposedly use so much power and water.
What I have not heard about, is what is the need or function of the data centers. The internet as we know it has been around for decades, and has functioned without all of these data centers.
I’m sure I’ve missed something. But wondered, why the talk of data centers springing up, and why is there a need for them? What functions are they supposed to serve, that are not already being done with how the internet functions now?