[doctorwho42]

The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them.

Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...

And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!

[xp84]

100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea.

We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there.

I'm much less pessimistic about this.

[ianbutler]

Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.

[dqv]

What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up.

[Schiendelman]

By capacity it's trending from around 60% now to 80% by 2030.

There is LOTS of reporting about this. One example:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsof...

[dqv]

I don't see in that article where you're getting 60-80%. Why link to one example instead of the "LOTS" of reporting that shows the 60-80% number you're claiming?

[Schiendelman]

My goal is to point out to you that it's very easy to self educate on this topic, your next step is to open Google up, or talk to your favorite LLM! I'm merely pointing out that it's trivial to start gathering that information.

[Mistletoe]

> Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts

What?

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[xp84]

Pardon my mistake. How do you even manage to have a drought when it rains all year long? Sorry, that just doesn't make any sense. You can drive around anywhere on the East Coast and everything everywhere is green all summer. I've seen plenty of places where people have 2-acre lawns that have no irrigation whatsoever, it just stays green. How can this be and still have a "drought"?

Maybe "drought" doesn't mean what I think it means. In this case, I amend my comment to say "There's clearly lots of water there" instead of "drought."

[doctorwho42]

Seriously... I get really annoyed with people who state opinions as facts...

Like the water situation east of the rockies has been pretty bad... It just ain't the desert that you get over in California or Arizona

[leptons]

The datacenter is still heating the atmosphere and consuming enormous amounts of electricity, which also heats the atmosphere. And it still won't solve our global climate disaster and is far more likely to contribute to a lot of bad things happening for humans.

[Schiendelman]

Compared to what? Meat consumption? Land use regulations? This stuff is just not a drop in the bucket in comparison to the decisions we actually tell our government to make.

[doctorwho42]

Compared to any other electrical system.

When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies.

And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another +30%-60% of heat on top of what ever number they quote for power because of the inefficiencies.

So for every MW, it's really 1.3-1.6MW of heating, then they use that 1 MW to power the cooling systems or the server clusters. So for every 1MW of power use, it's on the order of 2.3-2.6x of heat generated.

[Schiendelman]

Do you think that meat consumption doesn't release heat equivalent to the caloric input?

[doctorwho42]

And a large amount of the energy for that comes from the sun, not burning fossil fuels.

Again, the scale is the issue at hand. These data centers are consuming more supplies and power for something that is not necessary to human existence

[chneu]

Beef consumption dwarfs data centers in terms of environmental damage for no good reason and does much worse things to water, but nobody cares cuz beef is a status symbol for people. AI is easy to hate and requires no sacrifice. But giving up red meat is kind of tough so nobody does it.

[doctorwho42]

Show me the numbers compared to all the new data centers for AI.

AI data centers dwarf any previous data centers you know about

[youre-wrong3]

It’s clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. Data centers don’t use water.

[doctorwho42]

So how does their cooling work? Clearly you haven't looked into this much

[youre-wrong3]

After a closed loop system is filled how much water does it consume?