Microsoft says it'll throw €3.2B at AI ops in Germany Microsoft has promised to splash €3.2 billion (£2.7 billion, $3.4 billion) on AI infrastructure and datacenters in Germany over the next two years. The spend represents Redmond's largest single investment in the Euro nation since the MS-DOS giant opened there in 1983, and will go toward expanding cloud capacity in Frankfurt …
Buried in all the hype, which skirted over tax breaks and other inducements, was the fact that only around 3,000 jobs will be created. I don't know where the rest of the money is going but from the announcements a couple of data centres and solar parks wouldn't be it. And I wonder how many jobs Microsoft hopes to destroy by getting more companies to use its infrastructure and services?
Would that be "Germany" as in "*here*, this Germany" ... that I'm living in... that shut down all its nuclear "Atomkraft" power-plants under pressure largely lead by the greens who were manipulated into opposing nuclear power, decades ago.
THIS very Germany that had to re-open coal-fired power-plants when the "Ostpolitik" policies were shown to be failures and the pipelines carrying liquefied-dead-dinosaurs from Russia were limited?
THIS Germany that imports electricity from aged and decrepit nuclear plants placed conveniently far outside the borders as to be immune from the anti-Atomkraft lobby in the Bundestag, yet close enough to annihilate quite a damn lot of it, should they go boom as the misguided fears of the past foretold – the same fears that were over-played by, yes, the Greens, in fighting against Atomkraft and achieving a massive win for Big Coal, back in the day?
Whatever power Microsoft draw to power those data-centres, they have no moral right to do so – certainly not for "A.I." – but it gets worse because they'll surely buy their power wholesale and it will surely also be discounted! On the ground, consumer electricity prices are sky-high and the need to convert to electric heating – gas heating being phased out – will be punishing to many people and families in the very near term. Spending Watts on the stochastic parrots of the already-rich is not going to insulate all the old houses or lower heating costs.
In a sense, this is very much a direct waste of resources on "artificial" algorithms in spite of the real-life humans who need them, and all so that a corporation's profits can increase in line with the latest fad.
Ich bin doch wutend.
THIS Germany that imports electricity from aged and decrepit nuclear plants placed conveniently far outside the borders as to be immune from the anti-Atomkraft lobby in the Bundestag, yet close enough to annihilate quite a damn lot of it, should they go boom as the misguided fears of the past foretold – the same fears that were over-played by, yes, the Greens, in fighting against Atomkraft and achieving a massive win for Big Coal, back in the day?
Iit is going to be powered by greenish hydro electric imported via underwarer cables across skagerak from Norway.
Our uttelry incompetent politicians used billions to lay cables to UK and Germany so we can sell electricity cheaply depleeting the water deposits and lay off all power intensive industry.
《Hopefully AI Powered Bing will get the ‘Shall we invade Poland’ question right and not a racist positive summarisation of the benefits of Bkitzkrieg..》
I am not so sure... Bing might have said Dantzig ok. But give Barbarossa a miss.
Letting LLM loose on the totality of german textual material might produce some interesting models. 19th century german philosophy could produce some peculiar AI hallucinations as would Malleus Maleficarum which, although in latin, was written by two 15th C. german clergymen.
I imagine it might wonder why JFK proclaimed himself a jammy doughnut. ;)
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