Oh, 16 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, thats quite a bit.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
216 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
83251 readers
3063 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We could soon heat entire countries with the heat from these doomsday factories
Would be nice if they built them in cold climates and piped the heat to houses and buildings like the steam era of old.
When will some bot/AI bro come to say "um, ackchually, thing that is important for human life is worse, Malthusianism is the solution"?
plug the cooling vents of those crapfactories
Blow the water mains.
Make a drone that can land on the roof, drop some thermite to melt a hole down into the data center, then have it lower a small EMP device into the hole and fry their whole system.
Years ago, I was driving through NY city-ish. We pulled over in a rest area and I saw a sign about turning your engine off. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, as did many other people apparently as their cars were idling. Then I got out of my car. I was wrong. The heat was insane. I couldn’t wrap my little head around it. I started doing the engineer math thing because it didn’t make sense.
Doesn’t surprise me at all these massive data centers are creating little heat domes. The cars were bad enough, and they are a fraction of the energy.
100% of electricity burned turns to heat save light that leaves earth. Gigawatt data center? That's ~650,000 1500w space heaters.
i work for a large power company, we have a data center customer that have as many equally sized cooling towers as one of our nuclear power plants.
Pretty soon you’ll just have nuclear plants just to power data centers.
Nuclear plants to power data centers to make ai slop to make more need for data centers to feed us ai ad slop...when does it fucking end?
I hope some vigilantes start taking action against these damn wastes of space.
The disease is late stage capitalism, the symptom is a mad dash to trade our natural resources for energy and pollution. The mad dash will continue as long as we're bleeding humanity to keep the shareholders high and dry.
Didn't Microsoft try to pay for a nuclear plant to be recommissioned just to power a data centre or something?
There have been several data centers that have bought nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island, they're going to fire that bitch back up, also the Regulators have been disempowered. Propublica on the last part if I recall.
Isn't the largest data center currently something like 100MW? So "only" 0.1GW...65.000 space heaters is still insane though.
That currently exist? I believe Colossus is pushing 150MW and aiming for 300. But Gigawatt centers are on the way
we were asked 400MW for a new data center, we told them 100MW is the max we could provide for now, and increase later, we have a new natural gas plant soon to enter operation to replace two retiring coal plants, but looks like we're extending decommission targets to keep demand
Oh. I originally put megawatt and thought that was too small so I just incremented the metric exponent.
There's 33kWh worth of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and they use 0.3gal/hour when idling, so cars are pumping out 11kWh of heat just sitting there....that's a surprisingly large amount of heat.
33 kWh/gallon * 0.3 gallon/h = 10 kWh/h = 10 kW
But units aside, that is really nothing. The car itself already has about 3 m² area or about 3 kW of sunlight. The issue is the CO2 (globally) and pollution from the car (locally, causing smog etc.).
I'm not sure what you guys are worried about. All that extra heat will just dissipate into the atmosphere and eventually radiate into space. It's not like there's anything in the atmosphere that would interfere with this cycle... right?
And the smoke from the peasants fires will make stars !
And we would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling fossil fuels, and cows too!
Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!
Sigh… wasting power, wasting nand chips, hard drives and for what? Aiding climate change.
But at least we can have a hallucinating chatbot.
No bro llms are good bro they're so efficient bro trust me.
I need 10 trilllion more bro and it'll be so good i promise.
What's the long/short term on burning them to the ground
How could they accidently be destroyed? So we could prevent it?
This is perfectly timed because WA states legislature ended their session this year and decided not to take up the topic of regulating data centers. Even better knowing that the PNW just had the warmest winter in history, record low snowpack and nearly every month a new mega data center is opening.
As a lifelong datacenter tech it really sucks seeing what monster this has all become. And I don't know what else I would do to pay the bills.
I used to work in automation within the auto industry. Once I became aware of the damage I was doing by being an enabler, that shit began to eat away at my mental health. I knew I had to make an exit plan when all of my day dreams while working there involved Molotov cocktails.
I don't envy anyone who has to deal with that kind of mental load. Knowing the harm you're causing while wanting the opposite but still needing to survive the next day, week or month.
Big brain moment. If we stop monitoring it, then problem doesn't exist.
You sir, just got a job in the nuclear regulatory c.ommission.
That’s a lot of degrees. Wow.
This is very similar to Rainworld lore
The findings are particularly alarming, the scientists say, because AI data centers are set to boom over the next few years
Citation needed, CNN. This is a good reason not to build them, but right now, data center construction is stalling:
Only 5GW of data center construction is actually in progress globally at this time, despite somewhere between 190GW and 240GW supposedly being in progress.
...and may this trend continue.
They are basing it on all the component manufacturers who said everything they produce for the next two years will be going to data centers.
I want to say CNN should know better than to just trust them at their word, but it's CNN...
I think multiple large memory and storage manufacturers publicly saying the same thing is about as reliable as it can get.
Promises in the AI space are a dime a dozen. If you're referring to the "letter of intent" that doesn't actually mean RAM is changing hands...
It all sounds as conclusive as the other things listed from that same link, including the $1 billion Disney loudly promised OpenAI, and quietly dropped.