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.
I sometimes work in the building that’s in the thumbnail of the article, that’s crazy to see.
But that being said, data centers are definitely a negative for the environment and using them for bogus AI nonsense is horrible.
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?
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Yeah. Press X to doubt on this
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.Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that’s equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.
Edit: and keep in mind, that’s HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that’s heating for over 600,000 people.
Sorry to nitpick but doesn’t 100% of it end up as heat? Vibrations, light, sounds, radio waves- all a tiny fraction of the power are also eventually absorbed by the environment.
That was my understanding at leastMy understanding is that some tiny portion, like 1-2%, is actually used in a meaningful way to do calculations to do what you want, but that could incorrect. Or it may be that that tiny portion still inevitably turns to heat, just indirectly somehow. I’m not sure, though, you could be right.
Yeah but will that happen in the 6M radius that we are talking about?
No, it’ll all happen inside the data center. The problem with that is computers hate all that heat, so they pipe it all away and dump it outside to the best of their ability. The data center may not be 6 miles wide, but then the wind starts blowing the heat around. Hell, even on a perfectly still day, heat would radiate out. They’re making enough heat to keep every single home in a city of 500,000+ people comfortable in winter, so it’s either that or the data center turns into the world’s largest oven.
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;
If that 16° in foreign members or freedom units?
Lol I thought Celsius, would’ve been hell. It’s in Farenheit
That’s still ~9°C, which is a lot.
Just need 1 km wide copper heatsinks
Where do you think the heat from that heatsink eventually goes? The only way to get “rid” of it is into the air or the water.
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?
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!
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,
For temperature, not really. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are useful for different things.
Fahrenheit is great for what we feel (it’s related to body temperature for the high end, and the freezing point of brine on 0).
Celsius is great for cooking, or applications where you care about what water is doing (0 is freezing, 100 is boiling).
Neither uses different scales, like other metric units increasing by 10s (at least, I’ve never seen anything like kC). If you’re doing that, you’re using Kelvin, which is a fundamental base temperature, where 0 is actually 0, which makes more sense for physics and math, but is less useful for what we feel.
I think the US should switch, just to make it easier to communicate, and other metric scales actually are better. C and F are both equally useful for different things though. Neither is actually a better scale.
As someone who grew up with Fahrenheit, it’s an arbitrary scale. 0 is the “coldest thing” that he could create in a lab at the time, basically a bath of ice and salt water, 100-ish was supposed to be the temperature of a healthy human body. They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with “what we feel”, people only think that because they grew up with it. The same can be said for all imperial measurements because there is no other way to say that 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard is “intuitive”.
Celsius putting freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (at sea level) are related to each other because it’s measuring the temperature of water the entire time and then setting that as a the literal metric we use to measure other things.
I switched to Celsius for a couple of years and after going through a couple of seasons or two I had an intuitive feeling for what a value would feel like. It made perfect sense. I only stopped using it because my phone switched back one day for some reason and I was tired of having to convert to freedom units to avoid getting odd reactions from people.
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
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.
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.
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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.
Isn’t the largest data center currently something like 100MW? So “only” 0.1GW…65.000 space heaters is still insane though.
You can have a complex of multiples though and they to congregate near each other for short interconnection.
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 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
Would be nice if they built them in cold climates and piped the heat to houses and buildings like the steam era of old.
“Like the steam era of old”? 🤣
What you’re describing is called district heating and is totally a thing in Europe. There actually are data centers in Europe that contribute to their local district heating grid.
Yep it’s how I heat my place, though 40-60% of the heat still comes from natural gas unfortunately.
This would require investment in infrastructure, which is a completely foreign concept to american politicians when it’s not about adding one more lane
That’s exactly what Google did in Finland.
Microsoft also has a similar project.
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.
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?
couldnt be those pesky gases that likes to trap and reflect heat could it?
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 !
Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!
That’s fucking insane.
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.
We could soon heat entire countries with the heat from these doomsday factories
