The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence are so energy hungry that they’re heating up their surroundings, according to new research. It’s an alarming finding given the number of data centers is predicted to explode over the next few years.
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? Thata 650,000 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.
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.
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 if 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.
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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
I mean, it’s a bit disingenuous to use a GW example in relation to the article, when the largest currently in operation is 0.15GW
we were asked 400MW for a new data center, we told them 100MW is the max we could go for now, and could 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
The planet is fucked.
Oh. I originally put megawatt and thought that was too small so I just incremented the metric exponent.
You can have a complex of multiples though and they to congregate near each other for short interconnection.
There’s 33kWh 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 rounded a bit (before I miscalculated), there’s 33.7kWh in a gallon and they use 0.35gal/h on average, so they actually use 11.8kWh just idling
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 we would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling fossil fuels, and cows too!
And the smoke from the peasants fires will make stars !
couldnt be those pesky gases that likes to trap and reflect heat could it?
Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!
Coming to a neighborhood near you, bringing the noise, heat, and higher electric bills.
The noise is the bigger deal.
Have seen the Benn Jordan video?
Would be nice if they built them in cold climates and piped the heat to houses and buildings like the steam era of old.
Tax them enough to install geothermal heat pumps in the surrounding homes.
No one uses in ground heat pumps, especially not existing units where you have to dig up the yard, but regular air source heat pumps are still good enough by far.
In-ground pumps are better, they’re just very expensive, hence the taxes.
That’s exactly what Google did in Finland.
Microsoft also has a similar project.
Oh, 16 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, thats quite a bit.
Only a handful of countries use Fahrenheit, but they’re still too arrogant to add the unit. I get not including Celsius because of the target audience, and dropping the unit in conversation but this isn’t that
metric is so much more simpler,
If only we could harness the energy of people bitching about not using Celsius we could power the whole world.
Ahaha. I’m not even bitching about that. I’m doing that pedantic thing that physics teachers do where they point out the number without the units isn’t correct
That said, if the US just used SI units…
Yeah it got me too haha
The graphs in the paper show the temperature 1 km away from the data center being 8°C higher and attribute that to heat emitted by the data center. That should start the alarm bells that something isn’t right with this paper.
Here’s a post going into the problems with it;
Demolish all this useless shit to the ground.
But won’t someone think of the TechnoFeudalists!
Think of all the money they can’t spent on hedonism and depravity!
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.
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.
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.
Worked for COVID amirite?
Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away, the research found, affecting more than 340 million people.
Huh?
Air and water move, especially when heated.
But un a radius of 6 mi? That sounds a bit high.
More close to a city with lots of concrete to store the heat.
That’s fucking insane.
