The catch is that it’s “unlimited” in that sense that the mobile companies have made people accept now, i.e., deprioritized. I’m on Visible, which is Verizon’s MVNO; my plan has unlimited deprioritized everything, and it’s $25/mo, with $5/mo discount for the first two years so I’m actually paying $20/mo for now. It’s mostly good enough for my purposes; I’m usually on Wifi anyway. When I was leaving a protest and turned my phone back on, I couldn’t get enough access to check the bus schedule or text my family, so that was frustrating; dense crowds are a problem. But I was previously paying like $130/mo for Verizon, so it’s more than worth putting up with. I got some mesh radios for emergency comms.

The noise is created by cooling, and AI data centers require so much more cooling that it’s hard to even compare them. The kind of server rack that would run something like Lemmy might draw 8-12kW of power. A new nVidia NVL72 rack for AI workloads, running the new B300 gpus, draws about 132-140kW. All that power ultimately has to be removed by cooling. You know how a regular laptop is basically silent, but a gaming laptop running something heavy will make quite a racket with its fan? It’s like that, but scaled up to the size of Manhattan.