Low humidity. Good for longevity of electronics, and makes the evaporative cooling more efficient. So it’s a matter of the benefits of that vs. the cost of the added heat.
Comment on Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Land is also relatively cheap.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Farms, now data centers? Let’s add a Nestlé water or coca Cola factory.
d00phy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I don’t understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
BakerBagel@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Because closed loops are more expensive in the short term, making it a non-starter
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I guess water is cheep enough.
Still kinda obnoxious though. Like they couldn’t see that the ultra high water usage was the thing that would get the most pushback from?
scutiger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Closed loop watercooling is really just air cooling with extra steps. The water is heated by the devices and cooled by a large radiator with fans. Or it’s cooled with a chiller which in turn is cooled by a radiator with fans.
Replacing the water is the most effective (yet wasteful) way to remove the heat.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I once saw a spa that was using a liquid cooled bank of computers to heat their pool water. It involves a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger so they’re not pumping chlorinated pool water through their servers but…I wish we did more of that. Server farms are a source of heat, lots of other things need heat.
d00phy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
To a point, yes. While you’re still using air to cool the water, I think it’s still a little more efficient than blindly keeping the server room at a low-ish temperature.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because they got fuck-you money.
xylol@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
They building a new data center in the bay area California that is struggling for water all the time. But its OK they are building it upstream towards the reservoir so they can get first dibs
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I wonder if they could use sea water for that. I know salt is corrosive, but surely there’s a reasonable solution there.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s not like they’re dunking the electronics in the water. They just need to filter it enough it doesn’t clog up the system and run it in a closed loop.
If I can have a closed loop with a reservoir for my home PC, motherfucking Amazon can build a water storage tank for their cooling.
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But that would require large capital investments that negatively impacts earnings reports.
Much better to screw over the people by taking their water for free.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Sure, but that means more space to allow for cooling the water so it can be reused. If you can cycle it w/ “unlimited” cool water from the ocean, it can be a lot more compact, and heated waste water could potentially be used by a desalinization plant to improve freshwater output.
xylol@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
Nuclear plants do that with lakes, they suck in cool water from one end and dump out there hot water at the other so that it can cool down by the time it circulates back in
SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember there was talks about a floating data center in the ocean.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’d much rather have underwater data centers. A floating data center seems like a massive eyesore and you’d need to run cables out there.
If you build one underground near the shore and then channel water in from the ocean, it should be much less intrusive.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
seawater would probably corrode whatever storage system they have in there overtime, all that biological material, chemicals and gunk.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sure. A lot of that can be filtered out, but there will be corrosion with whatever heat transfer system they use. However, seawater is free, pretty consistently cool temperature (esp. in the Pacific), and is plentiful, so replacing some heat exchange components shouldn’t be overly burdensome.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So that one’s not too worried about the tectonic stability thing, then.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
What’s it called/who should I look up to learn about this?
xylol@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
Its an amazon data center in Gilroy, been in the works for a long time but they recently put up the development signs so I think now that they ran the new water lines a like a year ago they are ready to break ground
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They don’t even have enough water for the garlic anymore, and that’s the crop equivalent of a fucking lizard :(
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Said in another comment, our deserts are tectonically stable and free of natural disasters. If you want redundant DCs, picking one on the desert is a good bet.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, all we got is man made tragedy of the commons disasters where the data centers deplete not only the water for humans, but the water for the data centers. Poof, no more data.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m more worried about humans draining our aquifers that took thousands, even millions, of years to fill. That water is no more replaceable than oil.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
its also colder at night, because the desert doesnt retain heat much? in places like vegas its hot, because the asphalt and concrete absorbs heat.
dyathinkhesaurus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s not their water, so they don’t care. When it finally runs out, they’ll just go somewhere else.
Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I mean, sure, that’s their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there’s no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
SARGE@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
That’s someone else’s problem. Hopefully someone after they’re dead, but as long as they have their golden parachute, who cares?
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
True but this isn’t specific to the tech bubble. It’s a feature of capitalism. Competition forces firms to adopt shorter term horizons. If a firm has significant profit to make by focusing on the short term and it does not, its competitor would. If the profit possoble within this period is significant, having the competitor collect it runs the risk of accumulating enough for hostile takeover. That would stop the current firm onwer from collecting profits in the future. Even if focusing on the long term is more profitable over time, firms may not survive in a competitive environment to realize long term profits. These are some fundamental processes that drive firms into short term horizons. With liquid asset markets there are even more direct processes driving firms into short term planning.
Add planning based mainly on prices, which don’t capture a ton of reality and you get situations like a water hungry datacenter in the desert, cause the price of water does not capture its long term availability for example.
All of this has happened in the past, even a century ago. It’s happened and keeps happening in other industries too.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s more an artifact of modern corporate structure where a publicity traded entity must always be growing or it will be considered a failure.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
They’re locusts. They don’t think about anything past the next fiscal quarter.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?