Nvidia is doing what environmentalists couldn't

I’ve spent close to 30 years working with organisations on their content and data, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: most of it is worthless.

We call that “dark data” which sounds almost romantic, as if there was something out there lurking in the shadows, ready to be discovered. There isn’t.

It’s just stuff no one ever looked at after the day it was created. Piling up in server farms, consuming electricity, water, and land on an almost incomprehensible scale. Estimates run from 40 to 90 percent of everything ever stored.

Senior management always followed the path of least resistance: buy more storage, it feels like progress and it’s cheaper than thinking.

Now the AI boosters say the magic is coming: AI will let us finally find the gold in those decades of sediment! I have bad news: there’s usually very little gold in there, and garbage in is still garbage out, no matter how many billion-dollar accelerators you throw at it.

But here’s the plot twist no one expected: the AI datacenter building frenzy has made all that hardware ruinously expensive. For the first time in decades, hardware is no longer so cheap a CFO can ignore it.

Organisations are suddenly doing the maths and rethinking their data retention policies. Years of environmental arguments, efficiency drives and, well, common sense, never worked. But Nvidia’s margins are doing the job.

Better than nothing, I guess.

Colin

PS: please think before you save