[oersted]

I'm confused, do they really have such an impact? They are of course big and expensive, but surely most datacenters are relatively innocuous in terms pollution and general disruption to the area compared to any regular heavy-industry site, right? Please let me know if I'm wrong, I'm not sure.

EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that because it sounds better. Local municipalities should definitely charge significant land rents or zoning fees so that the community benefits. China has been very successful at this for decades.

EDIT: Very rough overview after some research, using Colossus 1 as reference, which is among the biggest GPU deployments. Not thoroughly verified, but it'll be around the right ballpark.

- Electricity: 150 MW live, with another 150 MW planned/studied. That is like adding a medium electric-arc steel mill or large chemical plant to the grid. A small standard power-plant can generate about that much.

- Land / space: About 217 acres and 785,000 sq ft. Footprint-wise, that is like a large factory campus or logistics park; much smaller than a mine, port, refinery, or industrial farm, but far beyond a normal commercial warehouse.

- Water: Roughly 1.3–3M gallons/day in public estimates. That is comparable to the consumptive water use of a small-to-mid steel plant or a large industrial cooling site; not refinery-scale, but locally significant.

- Air pollution: The servers are not the dirty part; the issue is on-site gas turbines/generators. That makes it more like a small gas peaker plant than a steel mill or chemical plant. Colossus 1 reportedly used up to 35 gas turbines before grid connection.

- Noise: Mainly cooling equipment, substations, batteries, turbines/generators. More like living near a substation or small power plant than near a mine, port, or metalworks.

- Traffic / logistics: Heavy during construction, then relatively light. Much less disruptive than a port, mine, farm, steel plant, or refinery, because there is no constant flow of ore, scrap, fuel, chemicals, crops, containers, or waste.

- Heat: Nearly all consumed electricity becomes heat. At 150–300 MW, the heat rejection is industrial-scale, closer to a small power station / large process plant than normal manufacturing.

[vitally3643]

The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).

But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.

[amluto]

I’m sure there is real data and real math available.

For heating: imagine a 1km^2 campus. That’s 1e6 m^2, and peak daylight is around 1kW/m^2. So peak daylight on the campus is about 1GW. (Wow, just covering the whole campus with solar panels would be pretty awesome!) If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.

As for noise, there is no substantial noise emission inherent to the operation, so I expect it largely comes down to how hard the facility tries to mitigate accidental noise and how well local regulators enforce sound measurement and control. Consider a high-end Noctua or similar fan, compared to a super cheap fan of comparable RPM, flow, and static pressure — a 30dB difference in emitted sound is entirely plausible. The datacenter has some switching noise from handling its 1GW of power, but it also has lots and lots of fans and pumps.

An LLM informs me that 1kW of acoustic energy radiated into free air (no surfaces) is 79dB SPL, Z curve (unweighted), at a range of 1km. So if 1 part per million of the datacenter’s power consumption ends up as noise, it’s loud. There are all manner of corrections needed. For example, your ears’ sensitivity is much lower at non-peak-sensitivity frequencies. But the data center isn’t in free air, and the effect of the ground, the atmosphere under appropriate circumstances, and the height of the datacenter could easily dramatically increase the intensity at longish distances.

A lot of this boils down to large datacenters using immense amounts of power and that power being something you would prefer not to have redirected at you in any form.

[gruez]

> If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.

Doesn't this comparison fall apart when you consider that the heat is going to be dissipated across a large area? The reason why stuff gets so hot during the day is that the surrounding areas also get heated, so there's nowhere for the heat to escape other than up. If only 1sq km is getting heated, and that's getting dissipated, the effect is going to be far less than your implied comparison of 2 suns. To bring it back to your example, a patch of payment in the sun (ie. 1kW/m^2) can get scorching hot. But in absolute terms it's less than the output of a space heater (typical one is 1.5KW), not even enough to keep a room warm.

[amluto]

Yes, absolutely, but it will depend on where one is, the surrounding geography, etc.

A hairdryer pointed at me from 1m away running 24/7 will make me notably warmer. A hairdryer 20m away is probably unnoticeable. A 1GW datacenter is a lot of hairdryers. At some scale, there is probably a buoyancy effect such that cooler air will be drawn in near the surface, get heated, and convect upwards, so I could even believe that a monster datacenter would cool some surrounding areas. (The sun inland from the west coast in the US has this effect during certain seasons, and AIUI this is a good part of the reason that the areas very near the coast tend to be dramatically cooler than inland areas in the spring and early summer.)

[Aurornis]

> and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area

There was a study posted here on this exact topic a few weeks back. The most they could measure was a little over 1 degree C near the datacenter.

> But the point is they suck up land and resources

Land use for a datacenter is kind of negligible. Even the largest data centers are barely a rounding error compared to all of the other commercial and industrial operations around me.

Like it's not even close.

> They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.

For what it's worth, all of the data center projects I've looked up near me are being built in remote or industrial areas. It hasn't stopped the protestors, who are arranging for bus transport to get to the sites because they're so far away.

[jeffbee]

That paper was 100% garbage. It hinged entirely on the observation of 1 huge industrial park in Bajio, Mexico, which contains one AWS data center and about 3000 auto parts factories. The before/after breaking point of the effect was during the time that the park went from bare ground to industrial park. It has nothing to do with the data center.

[Aurornis]

Interesting. So the minimal heat rise observed was from the total transformation of the entire area and they blamed it all on the datacenter?

[jeffbee]

Yes. And just on the arithmetic it should be crystal clear that no data center is anywhere near energetic enough to heat the countryside for miles around. The effect comes from the man-made surfaces facing the sun instead of natural ground cover. Only the sun has the energy to do this.

I used the paper's data to investigate some of their claims. The top figure shows the temperature in the area surrounding Google's Oklahoma data center, in the middle of the figure. I think you can clearly see that the effect is totally dominated by the nearby coal power station and its huge, black pile of slag.

https://observablehq.com/@jwb/data-center-temperature-effect...

The scene is roughly here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2154925,-95.3281217,13968m/d...

Edit: fixed notebook access. Sorry.

[oersted]

But are they really at the same level of disruption as any steel, chemical, nuclear, gas, manufacturing, recycling... plant? A mine? A port? Industrial farming?

I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.

In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.

[smw]

I think the idea that they raise outdoor temps over a wide area is a myth spread on facebook. The physics doesn't work out.

[swiftcoder]

Just adding a square kilometre of parking lots raises the surrounding temperatures measurably, so I don't see how building a datacenter that size is going to have less impact

[expedition32]

Picture a town of 50k people with crumbling infrastructure and suddenly a tech bro wants to build his data center megasite there.

And these tech bros don't REALLY want to build out the infrastructure. All they want is tax cuts, cheap land and free power/water.

The locals ofcourse are supposed to prostrate themselves before the Emperor for this wonderful opportunity.

[toyg]

Heavy-industry sites are also extremely discouraged across Europe, outside of very specific zones. If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.

[gruez]

>If anything, the current shift is about bringing datacentres in that same category.

But datacenters are hardly that? Sure, maybe whatever musk's doing with on-site gas turbines might qualify, but it's hardly representative of datacenters, which are probably closer to light industry or warehouses in terms of local impact.

[thefz]

Noise pollution is huge and water usage is through the roof which could worsen the effect of droughts where water is already scarce. Not to mention the imbalances they generate on power distribution.