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? 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.
Come to think of it, you would think power generation would perceptively increase the temperature in the surrounding air and while I have heard of nuclear plants making bays or rivers a few degrees warmer near the plant I don’t think it’s even been described as this bad.
Putting on my ME hat. Power systems are designed to extract the most amount of energy of their fuel sources. This leads for waste heat to not be significantly above ambient temperatures as they have extracted about as much as they can from it.
I assume now many high end servers are now water cooled, so that probably improves their cooling performance of their system, vs the older ways of aisle cooling and having hot and cold sides of the rack.
But unlike power stations, I don’t think the data centers have incentives or the ability to extract much useful work from their waste heat, so I’m sure they are dumping it as fast as they can plus the waste heat from all the secondary systems, cooling, water pumps, etc. are just compounding the local air temps.
You’ll need the same number of cooling towers for the computers too. All the energy created by the reactor will turn into heat, essentially doubling the amount of cooling needed.
I don’t know why they don’t use geothermal cooling, especially with the footprint these things have. Compared to everything else it wouldn’t increase the cost that much, depending on how they do it, and even if it didn’t cover all the cooling needs it would cut down a lot of it.
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.
something tells me Datancenters power needs will exceed that of old nuclear plants, since they are tyring to expand.
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.
Have you seen the movie Bugonia? I’m nearly convinced that CEO’s are all human looking aliens that are determined to destroy earth and enslave humans. #tinfoilhat #downtherabbithole
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
You can have a complex of multiples though and they to congregate near each other for short interconnection.
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 postponing decommission targets to keep demand
I’ve had a pretty longstanding belief that a lot of the AI push is to inflate energy demand, as we increasingly add more renewables. In order to keep dirty energy “creating revenue” we need an energy sink to offset any added energy. I think this was crypto, and then NFTs. Those both faded away as soon as the AI stuff started being pushed. I don’t believe this is totally a coincidence.
The planet is fucked.
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 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