Technology

WTF? Have you ever been in a data center? They don't release anything. They just... Sit. And blink lights while server fans blow and cooling systems whir, pumping water throughout.

The cooling systems they use aren't that different from any office building. They're just bigger, beefier versions. They don't use anything super special. The Pfas they're talking about in this article are the same old shit that's used in any industrial air conditioner.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that a data center uses 10 times more cooling as an equivalently sized office building. I don't know about you, but everywhere that I've seen data centers, there's loads and loads of office buildings nearby. Far more than say 10 for every data center.

My point is this: If you're going to be bitching about pfas and cooling systems, why focus on data centers (or AI, specifically) when there's all these damned office buildings? Instead, why don't we talk about work from home policies which would be an actual way to reduce pfas use.

This article... Ugh. It's like bitching that electric car batteries can catch fire, pretending that regular cars don't have a much, much higher likelihood of catching fire and there's several orders of magnitude more of them.

Are Pfas a problem? Yes. Are data centers anywhere near the top 1000 targets for non-trivially reducing their use? No.

Aside: This is just like the articles bitching about data center water use... Data centers recycle their water! They have a great big intake when they're done being built but then they're done. They only need trivial amounts of water after that.