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.
Seeing this kind of news hurts. I’ve had a lifelong interest in computers and technology. I’ve made a career of it and live fairly comfortably because of it. But this makes me certain the positives don’t outweigh the negatives. And I wish we could go back to the 90s/2k when we’re certain this tech would lead to the betterment of the world. Sort of bearing my heart here but technology sucks now.
Same, this wave is smearing shit over the technical hobby turned career that I’ve loved since forever that I can remember. My recent desire to rewind and redo makes me feel old AF.
You expressed my own thought better than I could! 'member when Internet was that awesome thing full of promises that allowed people to share knowledge all over the world? Now we just swim in toxicity of all forms. What an absolute mess we made of my favorite technology ever. I poured my life in it, it’s the only thing that ever paid the bills, and now after being laid off for too long I barely have the energy to look for a job because I’ll hate it anyway.
Same. I’m at the point where if I never sat behind a computer again, I think I would be ok with that. Also, video games and their crappy consoles suck now too.
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.
You’re absolutely right!
can i have a job
Ain’t anything I can do for ya lol, contact IBEW.
i don’t know what this is
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?
Funnily enough, it looks like most data centers are built near mini-mansion neighborhoods.
Kinda nice seeing the affluent class have to deal with infrastructure being built at their expense.
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;
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.
affecting more than 340 million people.
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 leastYeah 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.
My 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.
All of the energy that does calculations gets turned into heat. The only energy that doesn’t get directly turned into heat is the mechanical energy produced by the fans (which ends up turning into heat), and the electromagnetic radiation (which also ends up turning into heat).
If the calculations didn’t convert energy into heat, a computer would essentially use no power. You can think of a computer like a really complex wire. The power consumption you see is actually the heat loss of that wire. The less heat you lose, the more efficient the wire is.
How did you go from 10% to 1-2%? Please don’t use such precise figures when the source is clearly your ass.
I said over 90% because I couldn’t remember the correct figure. I wanted to be as accurate as I could be with full confidence. If you think something I said was inaccurate, feel free to correct me, but so far, it looks like I was right but could have been more precise if I’d wanted to spend even more time fact checking.
Even a large parking lot has a huge impact on how hot the surrounding area gets. But not 6+ miles away.
A large parking lot takes in heat from the sun and the releases it when the surrounding air becomes cooler. It heats the air, the air rises, new air comes in. A data centre produces heat all on its own, all the time, without ever stopping. It’s the difference between putting a cast iron pan in the sun and just straight up lighting a fire and keeping it burning day and night.
Read those numbers again. A quarter million homes worth of heat, so like 100 homes tall stacked into the same square footage? Or at least 10, I’m not checking my math.
Yeah, a much smaller heat source will produce a much smaller heat bubble. 100 MW is an amount of power that’s difficult to comprehend. A home in the US consumes an average of ~11 MW in an entire year. Every single hour that a 100 MW data center operates, it consumes enough power for a little over 9 homes to run ALL YEAR. Every single day, enough power for almost 225 homes to run for a YEAR. The heat output of a data center is orders of magnitude higher than a parking lot.
Yea this makes the methodology super suspect.
deleted by creator
Yeah. Press X to doubt on this
Why don’t they build glass hydroponic vegetable gardens? The heating is free.
yea
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.
Depends on the type. Newer ones drill a column and put the loop into that. They have to dig deeper, but it means you don’t have to dig up the entire yard for loops of tubing and means that you can install them in locations with limited yard space.
That’s exactly what Google did in Finland.
Microsoft also has a similar project.
“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.
Yep, that’s exactly how it is for us. I really hope that our local district heating company get’s tfe shift to renewals done because CO2 prices are rising in the next years and district heating is expensive enough as it is…
This would require investment in infrastructure, which is a completely foreign concept to american politicians when it’s not about adding one more lane
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.
They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with “what we feel”
I didn’t say it did. I just said it’s more useful for that. Whether it was on purpose or not, 100 and 0 are when it’s dangerous. Before those it can still be, but beyond them you really need to be careful.
Celsius is also arbitrary. There’s no particular reason water, at sea level, is used for the scale. It was just chosen. If you’re measuring water, it’s great. Otherwise, there’s nothing that makes it “better” than F. It’s not easier to convert to scale to higher or lower numbers or anything, which is what the metric system usually has an advantage with. They’re both just scales.
I’ve been playing Stationeers a lot lately. (It’s a game about managing a station on another planet, and simulates liquids and gasses really well, following the ideal gas law, and phase changes, and all that good stuff. I highly recommend it, and the devs are great.) In that you use Celsius and Kelvin, with you often needing kK or even larger. It wouldn’t make sense to use F, because it’s hard to switch between F and K, but C and K are the same, with K just being 274.15 higher. I have no issue with C, but this type of use is the one place it’s better, and no one I know would ever have to do this.
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
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!
If that 16° in foreign
membersnumbers or freedom units?Edit: autocorrect error
Lol I thought Celsius, would’ve been hell. It’s in Farenheit
That’s still ~9°C, which is a lot.
Mini hell
Sometimes I wish the Epstein class would just mass bomb all us poors already and get it over with. This slow, painful death thing is extremely annoying and stressful.
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.
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.
Woosh!
Sorry, I did not catch onto your expertly crafted joke.
We could soon heat entire countries with the heat from these doomsday factories
That’s fucking insane.
