Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose, California, to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next,” hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a room packed full of interested Ars readers, and for everyone who was able to come, thank you for being there! (For everyone who wasn’t able to come, that’s okay—we’re doing another event next month in Washington, DC. I’ll have more info about that at the end of this piece.)
The San Jose event was hosted at the Computer History Museum, which, as venues go, was absolutely on-brand and appropriate—and Ars would like to extend its thanks to the folks at CHM for being so kind and accommodating to our gathering of geeks.
“Our lineup of speakers and topics today reflects the complexity and rapid evolution of the tech landscape we all operate in,” noted Fisher in his opening remarks on the program. “We will be discussing not only the promise of generative AI, but also the challenges it brings in terms of infrastructure demands, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts.”
The panels
To Ken’s point, our first panel was on the environmental impact of ever-expanding data centers (and, often concomitantly, the AI services they’re providing). We spoke with Jeff Ball, scholar-in-residence of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy & Finance at Stanford University; Joanna Wong, solutions architect for AI & Storage at IBM; and Ars’ own Senior Science Editor Dr. John Timmer.
One of the main points from the panel that I hadn’t fully grokked before but that made absolute sense after having it explained was Ball’s contention that “not all power is created equally”—that is, when looking at cloud resources as a way to shift environmental costs to a third party, the actual physical location of those cloud resources can have a tremendous effect on carbon footprint. The cost of utilizing a data center in Iceland and a data center in China may be roughly similar, but there’s a significant chance that the data center in China will be using coal power, while the Icelandic data center is likely on geothermal.
