I wouldn’t let that be a deterrent to starting an instance. Just make sure you understand the obligations you have as site owner when it comes to misuse. Maintain good logging and follow legal requirements (which in the US is locking down and preserving evidence and reporting to law enforcement hotlines - depending on the nature of the misuse).
I think the supply chain issue is probably the most pressing out of all of them. The other points people have are either non-issues or a result of dropping usage hogs into existing electrical infrastructure. Infrastructure can be updated, though.
Supply chain is different. There isn’t a supply shortage of chips, its that profitability dictates you should sell them to datacenters or adjacent industry. Unlike infrastructure where you can just build out more, adding more supply for chips just means you have more to sell to datacenters. Since the demand is there, end of day profits will always win.
Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I’d counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I’ve seen a lot of too).
The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use “crisis”: https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/
68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That’s a lot…right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn’t compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that’s something that’s tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf
That’s 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces “something useful”, but usefulness doesn’t factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.
No, that’s not how the new EU legislation works. The new laws build off existing Digital Services Act (DSA) and legacy E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) requirements. The DSA states again that you would have to lock down access to the material (once you become aware) and then inform authorities.
All site operators maintain safe harbor with EU authorities unless those two points are broken. In both US and EU pending legislation, no requirement to scan all STLs is required, so you do not have to automatically check all files like you mentioned.