this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.
The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don't benefit the community at all, they're just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they're in. Small wonder communities are against them.
Horrifyingly, I just got done reading Surface Detail and there are huge datacenters that are low-energy, running slow in the grounds of a stately home.
Nice right?
Only issue is it runs the virtual environment for a different species VR Hell. Because it was outsourced here. Because they didn't like the icky situation of running their own hells.
Speak English only please.
This is what libraries should evolve into.
its all dedicated to peddling AI, google, metal PALANTIR, openai, claude.
Your town definitely hosts services for your local population, just not an entire datacenter's worth. No single town needs an entire datacenter.
My town does have a website but it doesn't do much other than list phone numbers and office hours for a few departments. what services are available on it are contracted out to corporate partners. I would not be surprised if the website itself is managed by a corporation as well. It is mostly useless and there is very little motivation to improve it.
But I'm not really talking about a municipal datacenter, more like a community center or library branch having a digital commons for the neighborhood, with some useful tools, access to reliable data, and maybe some recreational software. Something like what Nextdoor should have been but not enshittified to death by VC.
Honestly that doesn't really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.
I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!
isnt thats what PALANTIR is been trying to peddle to trump, its quite odd, more of a conicidenc we started hearing more and more about palantir since last year, when most people dint even notice it existed.
I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a "datacenter". I don't really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I'd argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don't think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.
literally no one calls a single server a datacenter, and there is no reason to. If you did, then you'd just need to come up with a new term for datacenters. for what? Just use the term the way everyone else does.
Digital Oil Rig is such a great analogy for multiple reasons.