And all that for some shitty pngs and the pleasure of not being attended by actual people.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but shouldn’t something generating the heat of several atom bombs be utilized as a heat source for making energy, instead of energy used to cool it?
I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.
Sounds like a problem one of our super genius god brain billionaires should be able to solve before lunch.
It’s really difficult to recuperate waste heat spread across such a large space in a way that doesn’t compromise on cooling effectiveness.
Basically not enough delta in temperature
deleted by creator
Decades of protests and innovation to stop climate change
VS
one AI techbro
Poof! Progress gone, just like that
that is because protesting just raises the awareness of the issue. Its better than nothing, but only direct action has any effect on anything at this point. The billionaires should be considered to be akin to foreign occupation and resisted accordingly.
“When I think about what’s going to lead to intergenerational prosperity in Utah, it is not a data center, it’s the beautify of our landscapes”
This is what’s going to kill us as a species. Because a data center doesn’t do anything. Nothing worth this horrific environmental damage.
At every turn, there’s another terrible consequence to wildlife, more pollution… when did we forget we are animals, too?
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could invent some kind of technology to distribute the compute so it wasn’t so terrifyingly concentrated /s
intergenerational prosperity
If I know my rich sociopath talk, this means “generations of MY descendants being old money rich and saluting the giant portrait of ME over their comically large fireplaces.”
An “atom bomb” is not a standard unit of measurement. It’s less than helpful.
Pffft. An ‘atom bomb’ as a unit of measurement is (roughly) equal to:
ff x (hdl/afps) x solh x ambWhere:
ff = football fields
hdl = hot dog lengths
afps = average Floridian pants size
solh = Statues of Liberty heights
amb = average medical bill.Americans will use anything but the metric system.
Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
How many atom bombs less than helpful is it?
5
Yes but at that level of energy no unit is useful for the average person to comprehend. I somewhat understand the usage here. If it was in joules very few people would be able comprehend.
But then why pick 23, a number with two significant digits, to indicate scale? By this logic, 10 would be as effective at communication.
The 9 GW are already there if anyone needs a proper value, but without anything to compare it to, 9GW means nothing to most people. Hence the comparison.
9 is not the total energy. The article says the total thermal load is 16. 9 for the electrical usage and another 7-8 in the form of cooling. It also says that’s the amount of 40,000 Walmart Supercenters…if you want another non standard American unit of measurement
If you want a standard unit of measurement, I trust you can re-read the title and find “9GW” in there. That is a proper standard unit, but to most people a number so mindbogglingly huge makes no sense at all, so they added a comparison to something people are more likely to being able to even roughly conceptualize.
That 9gw is not the whole amount. the total thermal load is 16GW.
Which according to the pdf is equal to 40,000 Walmart supercenters if someone needs a non standard, American unit of measurement…
Thats enough power to send Doc and Marty on 14 and half trips through time.
that’s probably why they put an actual value in the title preceding it
Nuke bad. Propaganda
generate the waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day.
Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
No, in this case humans are just really bad with large numbers. Most people can’t even get the difference between a millionaire a billionaire or a trillionaire, despite orders of magnitude difference.
Sometimes you have to use the power of a bomb or a star, or the amount of time it’s going to take for heat death of the universe just to get the point across.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Is that a realistic Approximation of energy usage? This seems a lot to me, even over the span of one day
Definitely off by a few orders of magnitude.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
17gw of heat is both under and over estimate.
3,600 of those industrial-scale generators to power Stratos
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
Does “9GW data center” not mean “a data center that consumes 9GW of power”?
Or is it “9GW of computers + 5GW of cooling + something”?9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
its 9gw of consumption. 19gw of total heat generation.
For comparison, a blast furnace making steel uses on the order of 3600 GWh/yr and the energy comes primarily from coal.
9Gwh is a high number for a datacenter, but industrial processes use much more and much dirtier energy.
That’s also one datacenter and the largest. Whereas there are many, many blast furnaces running all over the world.
Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.
Who’s this ‘we’ you’re speaking for. Do you have a frog in your pocket?
Sounds like he’s talking about Americans. I don’t think “frog personhood” has been established there at this time, unless one owns a corporation.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
I still don’t quite understand. Can I get a conversion into how many hotdogs the heat could cook?
Let’s assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:
q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.
The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:
9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second
With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.
342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds
Converting this to minutes:
890/60=14.8 minutes
So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.
Finally someone speaking english.
The math you just did terrifies me and I have no way of verifying it, so I’ll just say good job and leave it at that.
I think it’s also important to have a hotdogs per day figure, and the math from here is super simple, so I can do it.
384,1236060*24 = 33,188,227,200 hot dogs per day.
Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K
So the specific heat of water at those temperatures is 4184 J/kg K, and those food court hot dogs are probably about the same as Kirkland dinner franks, which have about 73g of water, 31 g of fat (specific heat of about 2300 J/ kg K), 16g of protein (1500 J/kg K), and 3g of sugars/carbs (1200 J/kg K), and let’s say negligible ash, so we’re left with a weighted average of about 3280 J/kg K.
That’s within 10% of your assumed value, so I think I just wasted my time trying to check your assumption, which was pretty close to my number that took a lot more work.
Well, there you go, free lunch for every schoolkid. Silver lining.
So if she weighs the same as a duck… then she’s made of wood…
and therefore…
A WITCH!! BURN HER!!
More than two
“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”
“So…seven hot dogs a day.”
It seems I should watch this show
Depends how well done you like them.
A lot
9GW is first. That’s metric. The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
Yeah, who doesn’t know the heat of an atom bomb? (which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude)
Well, everyone knows it’s at least a lot. That’s the point. Most people don’t know what 9GW means, in terms of heat. Even a small nuclear bomb it’s enough to vaporized a large area. This tells even the least informed person that it’s an amount of energy that should be concerning.
which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude
That’s why “Hiroshima” is now a unit. We’re lucky “Tsar Bomba” isn’t.
but first is peak power, not waste energy, we’re still missing the SI estimated number of Wh wasted per day
True, yeah. It should be Wh, not just Watts. I think most data centers are designed to run 24/7 though, so the Wh might be close to the same as peak.
If they can tell us how many “atom bombs” per day it takes to power it, at least we could figure it out!
The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
I wonder how many football fields long this thing is?
Well… It’s 9GW of waste heat. Same as the energy supply.
Probably like 8GW of waste heat, and 1GW of infrasound
Ok, but that will still need to be handled otherwise it’ll shake the building to it’s knees.
They just pump it outside of the environment
…into another environment?
No, outside of the environment.
There’s nothing out there but birds, (poor)people and 1 gigawatt of infrasound.
This is USica, it doesn’t matter where you’re pumping it, just that it’s out of where you’re pumping it from. Doesn’t really even matter what you’re pumping, USians gotta pump something.
Don’t know if you’re trying an obscure reference to the shadoks, an absurd french tv cartoon from 1968
No, 9GW of electricity, and they claim 16GW total. With a greater than 50% efficient gas plant.
How many is that, in bananas? Or school buses?
Sometimes you have to cater to the lowest common denominator (the AI booster).
Oh burning more fuel, you having a laugh mare?
Seriously anyone who thinks more carbon in the atmosphere is going to help may as well be in the loony bin.
Also sorry as a Canadian this idiot got vaulted to the world stage. He’s a moron as far as I can tell.
I’m just nobody though,but who can understand impact of climate change and the harm we’re doing to our world. So piss off with that idea until it produces a way to run without impacting our environment. If somehow you can then hats off to ya, I’d say I’d eat my hat but I really don’t want to and I’m a man of my word.
Mean I’d like to say worse and don’t expect anything but if somehow it can be better than thank them all. If not, fuck off for the advertisement I’ve seen enough commercials.
I propose a hyperscale billionaire cooking center where we drive the heat of 23 atom bombs directly up Kevin’s ass.
He’s no where near a billionaire.
I can’t wait to eat Kevin.
I’m fine with just cooking him and throwing the meat away
When I was in Florida once I was reliably informed that the alligator in the nearby swamp was called Kevin. This was about 10 years ago and I don’t know how long crocodiles live but if Kevin the crocodile is still alive maybe he would appreciate Kevin the billionaire
we got a datacenter just for cooking flesh.
I just started having random shark tank clips appear on my YouTube and totally unsurprised this dude is pos, stank vibe since the very first episode.
absolute and utter piece of shit, killed somebody a few years ago drunk-driving his boat, then made his wife take the rap for him…
They should really try boiling some water with that waste heat, maybe make it spin a turbine or two.
They should try moving to a place with fresh water and stop draining a pool of salt, if they have to generate this heat in a desert for no fucking useful reason.
Don’t give them ideas, otherwise O’Leary will start charging the locals a ‘Luxury Geothermal Subscription’ just to stand near the exhaust vent.
“neothermal”
I’m not sure we have ways of concentrating energy enough to do this. Heat pumps let us move heat, but I’m not aware of anything that can get the target to 100+ degrees Celsius.
Put a big ass sterling engine on the roof. But really, the level of waste heat involved does seems to beg for a system if these are going to be putting out that much.
But at least when I have to write a professional sounding email I can shut off my brain and make the computer cluster do it!
I don’t know who Kevin is, so I looked at his Wikipedia page and I’m still none the wiser what he’s actually done to “earn” all that money. Looks like a serial grifter.
Wanker from Shark tank. Should have been named Wank Tank.
Only if we can strap him to the heat sinks. 🍽️
Well, Davies has a point, communicating scale is the difficult part.
So, for those familiar with computers, think Scott this:
A typical Word doc or PDF is several hundred KB’s (kilobyte =1000 bytes) to 1MB (Megabyte 1m bytes) a jpg picture your phone takes, is 3-4MB. A full HD movie streamed online will be about 9GB (Gigabyte =1b bytes) of data. Obviously a movie is thousands of “images” stitched together so is file size with be significantly more. The same goes for that energy usage.
Similarly, Homes are measured in kW usage (technically usage per hour or kWh) on a monthly basis. You might use ~800-1,000kWh per month, maybe 10,000-11,000kWh a year. But let’s call it 1000kW are used, so 1mW or 1 megawatt. This data center would need at least 9,000x more energy per month as it’s gW scale, not mW or even kW… Plus, its power plant will be close by, so you’re creating heat and pollution to make the 9+gW energy and then USING up that energy and dumping 8+gW of heat, so his example calculated 16gW of heat being generated… That’s the equivalent of a good 16k homes, or ~60,000 people use.
THE KICKER that’s just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake’s water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F)…
Fuck AI!
Also, the lake they’re using to cool the data center is in critical condition for drying out. The great salt lake is at a tipping point where if they can’t maintain the current levels it could turn into a toxic dust bowl effect where all the toxic shit that’s collected in the dead lake for millennia will end up in the air in the valley.
Which is really weird. The world desperately needs desalination for freshwater but we say we can’t do it because the water is too expensive due to energy costs, yet here is another case where we piss away heat. Free market fundamentalism will be the death of us all. No civilization this reckless was meant to survive.
Inevitable at this point :(
One small correction. You switched units. You started with Watt-hours (kWh, energy) and then switched to Watts (GW, power). With the right units, it’s even more dramatic.
There are an average of about 730 hours in a month. If a home consumes 1000 kWh per month, that’s an average of 1.3 kW. If we divide 9 GW by 1.3kW, we get 6.9 million.
So this data center will use the same amount of energy as over 6 million homes. For reference, Utah has a population of 3.5 million (total people, not total number of homes).
Here’s another way of comparing the numbers. If this new data center uses 9 GW of power 24/7, that’s an about 6,500 GWh per month, or a little under 79,000 GWh per year.
In 2025, Utah produced a new record of over 35,000 GWh.
So this data center would more than triple the amount of energy produced in 2025.
Thank you for the correction!! Yeah, it’s basically really bad lol
Important and common misconception - kWh are not Kilowatts per hour and will lead to really bad math if you try and treat them as such. „Per“ has a specific meaning for units.
To be more specific, kW are already a unit of measurement over time (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), so kWh are actually a different way of measuring energy or Joules.
Just a quick correction, its M capital for Mega, m is for milli.
And Giga is also G capital, not sure there is a low case g for engineer notation.
This guy kilowatts.
It is fun. Bit per second, byte per second, makes a huge difference.
THE KICKER that’s just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake’s water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F).
I keep seeing this on Lemmy, but why do so many people think that these datacenters are using water from reservoirs for “cooling”?
Datacenters use A/C for cooling, and if there’s any sort of “Liquid cooling” being used on these servers, it’s in a closed loop system.
Water isn’t being pumped out as steam or into the environment directly from datacenters, unless there’s some other method I’m missing here?
What I think is getting mixed up here is that, for many forms of generating electricity, water is needed to be heated up in some way to create steam. The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not. Additionally, if the energy is coming from solar/wind/hydro then there shouldn’t be any concerns about water getting turned into steam anyway.
The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not.
No. All steam turbine plants have an evaporation stage in their cycle. They might have part of the loop be closed, but there’s always some part of the thermal loop that’s open.
I mean when you heat up a lake, it starts evaporating faster. Also some have switched to using evaporative cooling instead of AC. That’s why they’re building them in deserts. You can save a lot of energy, but need to waste water. In the desert that might piss off people living nearby.
But yes, the power plant water use is actually bigger than direct use. If it’s a lossy thermal plant.
Thanks, looks like I was wrong. I looked into the evaporative cooling. It looks like this kicks in if it’s hot outside, otherwise the cooling units operate in a “dry” mode.
Although, none of that is directly heating up a lake, it looks like the water just flows into something like an A/C unit. Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Yes, Equinix is one company building them. Of course they’ll tell you that this results in zero water loss, but it can’t be good for the long term health of the lake to use it as a heatsink.
In cold climates with distance heating, though, it’s possible to make efficient use of the heated water in the cold months by using it for residential heating. Not very useful in the summer though.
This is the reason. Deserts are hotter, but also dryer, so it makes evaporative chillers ridiculously efficient. That’s how and why they build datacenters out here. Go look at any DC facility in the state and you’ll see evapco equipment being used.
