Technology

this is 🔥

Is that Mamdani?

I wish I could get this on an animated T-shirt

Yeah the problems with all these data centers are largely solvable. The power usage part wouldn’t be an issue either if they were also investing in sufficient renewable sources to power these things, but instead when they don’t just dump the burden on whatever is already there they’re always reopening ancient coal plants or setting up gas turbines.

Data centers can be built in a responsible way, but the big ones aren't, instead they are built with the dirtiest and most resource consuming means possible because that is the only way to build them as fast as possible.

Responsibly built data centers of the future should be obliged not only to use closed loop systems but also actually use their huge amounts of heat instead of merely wasting it. Feeding distributed heating systems (or alternative ways of productively using that heat) should be obligatory. I know the situation is not the same as with gas power plants for example but it is incredibly wasteful not to use all that heat for something productive. We are talking about many MW here. For reference, the fairly sizeable waste incinerator plant Spittelau in Vienna has a capacity of 400 MW. There are currently data centers being built in the US with capacities higher than that and absolutely nothing productive is done with the waste heat.

Strict regulation is needed but not only that. Those gas turbines would be actually already illegal today. Laws are not enforced anymore for the oligarchs in the US. In other countries that nonsense would not fly already today.

As with most things, the problem is never the technology itself, technologies have problems, and we find solutions for those problems, that's what we do, that's how the progress of technology works. But nobody these days wants to let us have the solutions to the problems or even know what they are, when they can monetize a temporary remedy they can sell to us instead. And the problem is profitable, so they want to force us to have the problem; they won't let us stop using the problem technology either. Vulture capitalists preying on civilization and waiting for all of us to collapse from exhaustion so they can feed on our wallets, not caring that they're watching us die.

What's the power scale of yours?

I suspect the big ones use evaporative cooling because they're trying to build in the gigawatt scale and IIRC there was talk about single racks reaching a megawatt soon, currently they're ~150 kW.

The power density of those new nVIdia GPU compute servers is nuts and using evaporative cooling means less energy use than closed loop.

What I'm saying is, some of those planned datacenters wouldn't be feasible with closed-loop water cooling. And yes, I agree with you that this should be legislated. If they can't cool their servers without evaporating a bunch of drinking water, they can... have fewer servers.

But that would cost more money! Then line might go up a little less! Won't anybody think of the poor investors!

"But that corporation gave me so much money! I thought I was doing a good job..."

hes being bribed by the techbros, of course hes tonedeaf.

They also don't create jobs. At least not locally. Both the data centers my employer has are practically unmanned. They have half the NOC guys working from there just to have someone in the building in the rare chance something happens. There's zero reason anyone should be giving out incentives to have one of these fucking things put in near them. If they're going to allow it at all charge the absolute fuck out of the company building it so that the locals benefit.

If you can buy a local politician for 0-100k dollars and youre a business that makes that in seconds then you can do a lot of damage.

And uses up all the power, making water and power far more expensive, and they'll use that data center to replace jobs with AI, and surveill us so they can put us in concentration camps.

We are totally aware of the downsides of the data centers, and also aware that the primary reason they want them is to get even richer at OUR expense.

The answer is NO! And if you don't like that answer, we can make it more emphatic in many ways, which the wealthy really don't want to experience. I suspect that we'll have to have several examples before they'll truly understand. Luigi was one. There will be others.

Because he doesn't care about that and so he assumed no one else would either. Most politicians are sociopaths and they seem to assume that everyone else is secretly a sociopath as well. Especially on the right.

How is this not violating a noise pollution ordnance