Data centers that serve up videos, such as Netflix or Amazon, aren’t nearly as energy intensive as those used for AI. AI data centers are close to bitcoin mining for energy consumption (and waste).
State & Local Government vs. Datacenters
- Thread starter Shavano
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I would not say AI data centers is close to bitcoin. There are real usage and value to AI data center. The value is just hard to measure right now. We are at the early Uber/DoorDash phase of the investment, everything is heavily subsided by PE and FANG's money. We would not know how valuable it is until we get to phase these companies want actual profit. Also, if all we end up is a lot of AI boy/girlfriends or meme video (or worse use for monitoring people and proproganda), then it would be negative society value even if there is profit in them.
I don't know about that. For instance, I might care that my chicken wasn't fattened up using antibiotics. And, without supply chain auditing, that would be impossible. Instead, without supply chain auditing, it would also be unprofitable. And that's hardly the only such issue I might care about.
But, then, many investors would prefer I just think my chicken wasn't fattened with antibiotics. And so would have problems with any real supply chain auditing. So, you aren't far wrong, especially in this economy.
You are literally arguing against a tautology here. If the data center base was insufficient to do what is already being done, then less would necessarily be getting done. That (some) folks want more is a separate "issue".
Let's assume--for a moment--that there will be a technological break-through in AI that delivers real transformation in the time frame the boosters suggest. If a leader knew that was what we could expect, shouldn't that leader put as much--if not much more!--emphasis on helping society navigate that transformation as they do on accelerating it?
I've seen some tut-tutting of new graduates booing commencement speakers from the tech industry putting AI front and center in commencement ceremonies. Many of those graduates will have been on a 5 year program and incurred significant debt investing in themselves. To put that 5 year time in perspective, my rig is younger than that, and I certainly did not pay current prices. So any time a tech industry speaker put the onus to adapt to AI-influenced market conditions that negatively impact their employment prospects, they are implicitly chiding the graduates for any struggle to meet challenges that those same tech industry leaders failed to forsee when the graduates embarked on their college programs.
The China boogey man on this front is getting old, too. Theoretically, the Western lead here includes AI software/models, chips (nVidia), and chip manufacturing technology (ASMR). If the west cannot leverage those strengths to maintain a lead, what are more power plants and data centers going to do by comparison?
I'm sure the canned response from AI technology leaders would be, "Not my bag." I think the response should be, "Well, then, the state needs to work with technologists who can see the bigger picture."
Bad cult replaces good cult, but for most people (who are not techies in any respect) both are cults because they want to conform to fashion. Fashion's their condition of engagement.
Those wanting positive change need their target audience to feel they've special insight by supporting that change.
Instead we have OpenAI arguing in court that it's not their fault that their chatbot keeps cheering people through suicide and lethal drug use. Should have read the TOS you agreed to when you signed up to use our murdercoach!
Data centers do, in fact, have pretty minimal externalities compared to other industrial-scale facilities. They don't dump mercury in the rivers or belch black smoke into the air. Yes, they consume power and water, but they buy these at market prices. It seems like you're implying these market prices don't reflect externalities associated with power and water production? Okay. I'm sure that's true in many cases. What's the proper solution to that? Correcting the prices? Or retaining the incorrect prices, but banning additional consumption to minimize the damage caused by those incorrect prices? Because opposing data centers on this basis is the latter.
Most larger projects now intend to generate their own power, or are specifically contracting for new capacity. While some of this will be gas, it'll likely increasingly shift to solar due to multiyear backorders on gas turbines. SpaceX, a few days ago, announced plans to build a solar factory in Texas that will scale to 10 GW of panels/year. Anticipation of data center demand is also driving renewed investment in fission, and recent regulatory reforms may actually make it possible to build nuclear plants again.
Big picture, clean energy already completely dominates capacity additions in the world's major economies. We've already turned the corner on this. The assumption that using electricity at scale is inherently problematic because of climate change is rapidly becoming invalid.
So we ban the data centers and… then what? The same capital flows to something else that provides a similar return? I legitimately don't understand how you imagine this working. This is what's actually generating growth right now. If you cancel it (which seems like it would be wildly unprecedented, by the way), there's no mechanism by which something else automatically shows up to replace it. You just don't get that growth.
Right, silly me. I haven't been posting in SB much lately, and I momentarily forget that describing the model that has produced the societies with the most (and most broad-based) prosperity of any that have ever existed on Earth as working "reasonably well" is the sort of thing that's controversial around here.
Again, I argue against "minimal" externalities.
Proper "industrial" comparison would be an airport without the necessary infrastructure for passengers or freight. Especially with the natural gas turbines because the local electrical authority isn't approving electrical hookup to the grid. And the water usage of an 18 hole golf course.
Just to quote the data center hysteria thread:
quadrupling the electrical power demand for the State of Texas isn't minimal.
The externalities just of that would include pricing all other industry out of the power market.
of course not all states are opposing datacenters. Some of them are enabling them, so they can profit.
* State Senator John "Jay" Morris.
In good news on this front, the Dubuque County Board of Supervisors approved a 12-month moratorium on any data center projects in the county ... so, for at least a year, my little corner of Iowa won't have any of this bullshit.
The data centers can probably build with environment friendlier approach than a steel mill. The problem is the current data centers are not built with any environmental protection in mind. There are probably local in Texas that have a lot of solar and wind power that can benefit data centers. data centers can probably be sound proofed as well. There are also different way to cool these centers.
The current issues is everyone is rushing to build and trying to externalize the cost to public as much as possible.
The problem with your position is that you're going up against laws of thermodynamics. There are only so many ways to power and cool a gigantic farm of server racks that are kicking out over 1,000 watts per chip, and there are only so many (and a lot fewer) ways to do so effectively while also minimizing the impact to the surrounding area.
The problem with your position is that we're asking the data centers to go with the more expensive options to limit externalities rather than trying to regulate them to break thermodynamics.
As for cooling:
The one most of us should be familiar with is the closed loop. The example here is your home air conditioner, particularly the window models. Water usage is somewhat incidental i.e. washing down the heat exchanger fins to restore efficiency, especially in dusty environments.
Then there's the evaporative coolers a.k.a. swamp coolers. These work by drawing out heat when water evaporates. These work best in arid environments a.k.a. deserts. This saves a fair amount in electricity.
Then the most water intensive use would be city water cooling. It's generally a once through system and uses the fact that water generally gets pumped in at 50F and raises the temp to 80F before being dumped into the sewer.
I'd like the data centers to be regulated to use closed loop cooling. This is both more expensive upfront and ongoing than city water cooling.
As for power, the data centers could go and make power purchase agreements or they can do the less risky (and costly) to the data center by bullying the local power regulators to hook up to the grid (which makes the power generation someone else's problem).
Finally, my bugaboo, acoustics. You can install noise barriers, adjust fan sizes, have set backs, etc. or you can have what ever 1/4" drywall that they install between cheap apartments where you can hear your neighbors all the time.
So, none of these solutions are physically (or thermodynamically) impossible. Some need to be implemented in the building phase. They all do cost money, both in building and on going operating costs. So, I'd rather have them be put into the go/no go decision before waiting for the consequences and the only way to fix it is to either close down the data center or tear it down and try again.
and they won't unless they are compelled to. Why would they? When has capital ever?
Yes. Why make what they can take from someone else by paying a few people to see it their way?
Every closed loop needs an open loop to dump the heat in any locale where the temp rises above 80 degrees, which is all of the lower 48 states.
These data centers take potable water and dump it at the end. And many of them are bikbg built where this will cause water shortages.
And the energy used keeps fossil fuel prices up as they compete for generation and grid interconnects.
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It's entirely possible to design a closed loop cooling system that operates well in excess of 100°F, you just need a big-enough super-white radiator to expel the heat. Hell, if you used active cooling, you could even get by with a smaller radiator. But, by comparison to a cooling tower, that would be super expensive, so cooling towers are much preferred. And, of course, cooling towers are basically swamp coolers.
Silicon works acceptably at temperatures of +85C (of the heat sink), which means the semiconductor is signifcantly hotter than that. How much hotter has to do with your package and heat sink design. Semiconductors can typically operate with junction temperatures up to 125C. But lifetime decreases as you get to higher temperatures, and there's a tradeoff between hardware lifetime and operating temperature. That's moderated by expected obsolescence. If you expect your useful lifetime before you're going to want to replace the hardware anyway is 5 years, you want a small percentage (nonzero) to fail in the first 5 years at your operating temperature.
But anyway, +85C can be effectively cooled to air that's at any temperature you can get on Earth's surface. Max for environmental temperature most places is under 45C. The cooler the air the better.
But yes of course it's cheaper to dump the heat in water and dump the water, if there's plenty of available cool water. The question for cities and states is do they have plenty of water and don't mind somebody dumping a gigawatt of heat in it? Warming water causes damage to ecosystems. So does warming air, but the warmer air dissipates over a larger area.
I mean I would still oppose it on principle but if these companies want to bypass public backlash against them I’d suggest start heavily bribing the communities and their voters where you want to build a data center in and not through some obfuscated tax dollars. I realize bribing politicians is cheaper but that’s not really effective when they get voted out due to approving these things. Or they can continue to be considered a scourge I guess.
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That's what was happening here in Dubuque County. Back-channel discussions were happening between the county, a developer who wanted to construct a massive data center, and the people who own the property the data center would have gone on, here:
Only four families own these tracts of land, and they each had agreed to take $1.5 million in lump sum
Well, someone talked, the citizenry revolted and now we have our twelve-month moratorium on all data center projects in the county.
So they're already working on buying off the populace; in this case, they just focused too narrowly in trying to buy off the landowners in particular instead of the citizenry in general.
Per the bolded, that depends on whether they are open or closed circuit. Closed circuit types recirculate the water, so far less is used.
Huh?
I'm talking about air cooled air conditioners. These are generally built to ANSI/AHRI Standard 550/590, which calls for 95F ambient temperature. In that article, they say that they design to 105F for Austin.
Daikin will sell you a 565 ton air cooled chiller.
A 60kw AI data cabinet produces approximately 60kw of heat, which is ~205,000 btu/hr or ~17 tons of cooling. Add in a 30% buffer, let's call it ~22 tons of cooling required. So that air cooled chiller (i.e. closed loop), should cool about 20 to 25 AI data racks that produce 60kw of heat (or fewer racks if you insist on putting your data center in Tuscon, AZ).
So, will you need a shit ton of air cooled chillers? Yes. Will that be expensive? Most certainly more expensive than the water cooled designs. Will it produce a lot of noise, you bet your damn pants. Is the "open loop" just air? Sure, but you're not using a lot of water.
Closed circuit cooling towers work by spraying water onto a closed circuit of pipes circulating working fluid in order to cool the coolant to near the wet bulb temperature. So, while they use noticeably less water than a once through system, they still use quite a bit of water. That said, I will correct myself, dry (and hybrid towers that operate both wet and dry) cooling towers are a thing, so, there's that. But, they aren't the most common reference.
All of which is to say: closed circuit has nothing to do with if the heat exchange system is wet or dry. It just means that there is at least one.
You're right. I should have been more correct in my terminology here.
Helsinki had an interesting approach where the heated water used to cool datacenters are stored in storage tanks and then piped to surrounding homes to use as hot water and for home heating. You might even use some of it with thermoelectric generators to recapture some of the heat as electricity.
The tension there is it requires a) the data center to be sited near enough to a residential area that the hot water can get from the data center to the residential area while still hot and b) small enough that it’s not generating more heat than can be used. And if B is the case that means it’s necessarily smaller than optimal since these data centers really thrive when you can get them to scale.
So 100% we should try to make as much use as possible of the excess heat generated. That seems obvious. And we’ve likely not scratched the surface of the various ways that waste heat could be used. But in order to unleash creativity in the way that waste heat is used, we need to internalize the externality - make it expensive for data centers to dump heat into the environment.
OK guys.
We know we can force active cooling using football-stadium-sized radiators. But those are prohibitive at the power densities we are talking about here. A solely air-cooled system would require 15% to 25% more power per MW of compute, and much lower rack densities as a 100 kW rack can't be cooled by air, and if cooked my a closed loop, the air required to cool the liquid would need to be the size of a football stadium.
We know we can force active cooling using football-stadium-sized radiators. But those are prohibitive at the power densities we are talking about here. A solely air-cooled system would require 15% to 25% more power per MW of compute, and much lower rack densities as a 100 kW rack can't be cooled by air, and if cooked my a closed loop, the air required to cool the liquid would need to be the size of a football stadium.
OK. Niw do the math on a 700 MW datacenter. That’s a factor of 10K in size, or 220,000 tons of cooling. Find even one data center at that scale using air cooling.
I’ll wait.
I bet you not a single one is being built that way as
1. It’s much more expensive.
2. Any power budget that can is being put into compute and not cooling.
... Are we still on that stupid debunked water use crisis?
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
Colossus 2, one of the largest AI datacenters, uses as much water as 2.4 burger restaurants. 2.7 billion tokens to 1 burger is the conversion rate.
And the water it uses? Reclaimed municipal waste water. It would have been dumped anyway, now it's recycled, and provides more than enough to run the hybrid adiabatic chillers.
If you want to rage about water use, rage about agriculture. Alfalfa uses 500 gallons per pound, for animal feed, and often exported. Saudi Arabia banned growing that crop yet imports "concentrated water" from the dryest states. Just think about how silly that is. That crop needs sun yes, more is better, but is also really bad at conserving water. But due to a historical error, water rights, and use it or lose it rules, we just flood the dessert to grow cattle feed.
Colosus 2 uses about the same as 200 acre of alfalfa. Or half of the average 400 acre farm in the west. And it's located in the exact opposite location, climate wise, along the Mississippi River, a region characterized by high humidity, heavy annual rainfall, and massive water abundance.
I could go on. But really, if you are to build something that needs serious amounts of water, duh you are placing it in a place where it's not stupid hot, has plenty of water, and better yet make it "water neutral" by reclaiming it out of the sewers. A gallon here is not a gallon in Arizona or Utah. The Colorado river system is in serious deficit and these two states grow 2.3+2.5 million tons of that stuff, requiring heavy irrigation, and uses the water of 2825x Colossus 2's.
Now that's what I call a waste. This isn't even a rounding error even before you add a conversion rate between gallon in the dessert vs a gallon in a wet area.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
Colossus 2, one of the largest AI datacenters, uses as much water as 2.4 burger restaurants. 2.7 billion tokens to 1 burger is the conversion rate.
And the water it uses? Reclaimed municipal waste water. It would have been dumped anyway, now it's recycled, and provides more than enough to run the hybrid adiabatic chillers.
If you want to rage about water use, rage about agriculture. Alfalfa uses 500 gallons per pound, for animal feed, and often exported. Saudi Arabia banned growing that crop yet imports "concentrated water" from the dryest states. Just think about how silly that is. That crop needs sun yes, more is better, but is also really bad at conserving water. But due to a historical error, water rights, and use it or lose it rules, we just flood the dessert to grow cattle feed.
Colosus 2 uses about the same as 200 acre of alfalfa. Or half of the average 400 acre farm in the west. And it's located in the exact opposite location, climate wise, along the Mississippi River, a region characterized by high humidity, heavy annual rainfall, and massive water abundance.
I could go on. But really, if you are to build something that needs serious amounts of water, duh you are placing it in a place where it's not stupid hot, has plenty of water, and better yet make it "water neutral" by reclaiming it out of the sewers. A gallon here is not a gallon in Arizona or Utah. The Colorado river system is in serious deficit and these two states grow 2.3+2.5 million tons of that stuff, requiring heavy irrigation, and uses the water of 2825x Colossus 2's.
Now that's what I call a waste. This isn't even a rounding error even before you add a conversion rate between gallon in the dessert vs a gallon in a wet area.
We already have worked examples of how to cool industrial-sized heat sources - thermal power stations. Nuclear stations are probably the best point of reference, because they tend to both have the lowest thermal efficiency, as well as relatively low exhaust temperatures: for example, Hinckley C is due to dump ca. 6GW of heat into the Bristol Channel. Drax dumps ca 1.7GW of heat into both the atmosphere and the river Ouse. Once-through cooling doesn't need to consume high quality potable water.
If the cooling requirements come to dominate the costs - due to, for example, effective regulation or local opposition to resource limits, noise pollution etc - then it "just" becomes another factor to consider in proposing new sites - along with existing factors like available power, bandwidth/latency, workforce, zoning, etc.
What is most relevant is that data centres are held to at least the same standards as other industrial apparatus in terms of externalities. "Doing it on a computer" mustn't be allowed to be an acceptable excuse, nor must "but ai!!1!". Waste heat is just another form of pollution, like light, noise, particulates, chemical or nuclear contamination etc. Where it can (or must) be minimised, it should be. And what is still left should be held to comparable standards as existing industrial polluters (or, you know, preferably higher standards, that would be nice).
What must not be allowed to stand is repeating the argument that OpenAI etc have already abused: "our business models requires breaking the law, so we should be allowed to do just that", substitute for "breaking the law" as appropriate.
If the cooling requirements come to dominate the costs - due to, for example, effective regulation or local opposition to resource limits, noise pollution etc - then it "just" becomes another factor to consider in proposing new sites - along with existing factors like available power, bandwidth/latency, workforce, zoning, etc.
What is most relevant is that data centres are held to at least the same standards as other industrial apparatus in terms of externalities. "Doing it on a computer" mustn't be allowed to be an acceptable excuse, nor must "but ai!!1!". Waste heat is just another form of pollution, like light, noise, particulates, chemical or nuclear contamination etc. Where it can (or must) be minimised, it should be. And what is still left should be held to comparable standards as existing industrial polluters (or, you know, preferably higher standards, that would be nice).
What must not be allowed to stand is repeating the argument that OpenAI etc have already abused: "our business models requires breaking the law, so we should be allowed to do just that", substitute for "breaking the law" as appropriate.
400 MWh is enough heat to boil 555,000 liters of water. Every hour. Know any burger restaurants that do that?
Except that the reclaimed water plant has been put on hold indefinitely, so all the water for the foreseeable future is potable water drawn directly from the local aquifer. That's an aside from the unpermitted gas turbines that violate the Clean Air Act.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/xai-sidelines-major-water-reuse-project-as-ipo-looms/
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/
So let's not white-knight for these companies pushing externalities on local communities.
Of course it's much more expensive in both more equipment upfront and ongoing electricity costs. That's why the data centers don't want to do it and why regulations need to do it to reduce the negative externalities.
I can't do the math on a 700 MW data center because you haven't told me how much is going to compute vs. cooling vs other electric usages. Really you have to look at the power usage effectiveness vs. water usage effectiveness.
Also Microsoft and Oracle are using closed loop chillers for their AI data centers. So, stop waiting.
Also, since you have liquid coolant to pump to and from the chillers, you can do it in 20 rack blocks. So instead of having one giant nuclear plant sized cooling tower, you have a farm of heat exchangers and fans.
Water usage is more critical in say Arizona or Texas than in Virginia or Iowa.
Extra power can be generated by new power plants. Photovoltaics would be ideal, nuclear isn't terrible.
Extra budget is the problem. Either the data centers pay for it or John Q Public. And my point is that I want the data centers to pay for it. I'm not breaking the laws of physics or thermodynamics here.
Edit: more that I look into it, I'm ready to say do it like Microsoft and not like xAI.
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Colossus
Burgers
So wait, it's west coast beef water vs plentiful river delta water, so in actual climate damage, the burgers are worse than Colussus 2.
Almost a m3 of dessert water per burger, holy shit that's shameful. That's enough to water my veggies garden for a whole season, for 1 burger.
Yeah I'll just eat my grass fed Irish or Dutch beef thanks, at least most of the water just falls out of the sky, West coast beef causes environmental damage at a crazy scale.
So you are repeating datacenter shill propaganda, comparing dispersed use against a local, concentrated use that affects a local community.
A rise in prices due to a rise in demand isn't an externality, exactly. This effect is sometimes called a "pecuniary externality," as contrasted with a real externality. The distinction is not trivial. A real externality is definitionally an unpriced cost, and consequently the normal incentives of the price system won't act to reduce it. Real externalities are, in other words, a reliable source of market failure, where you expect government might have to step in.
On the other hand, prices rising in response to rising demand is a central feature of the price system. In the general case, it can be expected to induce a useful market response — incentivizing more supply, more efficient use, whatever. In this case, because data center operators themselves don't want to pay through the nose for power, and can anticipate the effects their demand will have, it is widely incentivizing them to build or specifically contract for new capacity.
Though supply and demand may get out of step in the short run, there's no reason to expect this process to raise prices long-term. It might even lower them. There are economies of scale in the production and distribution of power, after all. And higher demand can sustain more investment in R&D.
Oooh. SemiAnalysis, an AI Datacenter newsletter and consulting company, says that datacenters are no problem. Sounds like a completely neutral analysis.
Also, what kind of a logical argument is this?
X isn't so bad because Y (which is also bad) is slightly worse!
It's like something an argument a toddler would make. And that's ignoring the fact that we now have both X and Y existing simultaneously.
X isn't so bad because Y (which is also bad) is slightly worse!
It's like something an argument a toddler would make. And that's ignoring the fact that we now have both X and Y existing simultaneously.
WaPo has an article about Virginia data centers creating sickness from the polution they provide is an interesting view of the dangers of giving data centers free reign in local areas.
A Washington Post free article
From a local victim's experience:
Personally I reject any excuse corporate America has for doing this to our environment and at this point will never support it and I'll look at supporters as environmental terrorists.
A Washington Post free article
From a local victim's experience:
Personally I reject any excuse corporate America has for doing this to our environment and at this point will never support it and I'll look at supporters as environmental terrorists.
Another article about data center local citizens abuse and exploitation:From the Guardian: ‘Hidden datacentre tax’ costing Irish households millions, report says Datacentres used 22% of country’s electricity last year, pushing up household bills, study suggests
Corporate greed is rampant here as data centers tax local people and government as they terrorize the population and foul their environment.
Once again supporting this is a form of environmental violence and cannot be condoned in anyway.
Corporate greed is rampant here as data centers tax local people and government as they terrorize the population and foul their environment.
Once again supporting this is a form of environmental violence and cannot be condoned in anyway.