[amluto]

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year.

Summer is still an issue, but fun solutions are possible. With the right geology, I think it’s possible to heat an underground volume in the summer and recapture (some of) that heat in the winter. In many, many climates, annual heating costs are far higher than cooling costs, at least if people aren’t stupid with skylights. [0]

[0] As a back-of-the-envelope heuristic, heating or cooling load due to conduction and air exchange is proportional to the difference between indoor and outdoor temperature. Outdoor temperatures of -10F to 30F are not unusual in the winter and are 40-80F away from an indoor temp of 70F. But outdoor temperatures in these climates rarely exceed 95F and are mostly lower in the summer, so that’s 15-25F of cooling. And heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differences.

Radiative heating is an entirely different story.

[shagie]

Of old... https://web.archive.org/web/20210115152829/https://www.nrel....

It's got a "heat energy to/from campus" exchange in there.

That's a link in March and the air temperature was 31°F.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708150410/https://www.nrel.... is later with air temperature of 68°F.

[lrasinen]

Microsoft's already building data centers hooked up to district heating (Espoo and Kirkkonummi, Finland). Heatpumps are amazing.

(Seasonal heat storage is also a thing, Espoo's neighbours have tens of GWh of storage, with a new 90 GWh cavern in the works. Not sure if the systems are interlinked.)

[uberex]

45 is the cool temp so they could send the community a higher temp water to their heat exchanger?

Then 45 or below is sent back on the return.

[matt-p]

Yes, but the heat will still likely need boosting by about a further 10 degrees either at the source or end user.

DC inlet is 45°C, outlet is 55°C assuming a 10°C ΔT. By the time that's travelled 500m–1km through pipework you've lost a few degrees, so you're arriving at the HIU at maybe 50–52°C. The home radiator circuit then takes that down by around say 12°C, returning ~38°C. Factor in pipe losses on the return leg and you're back at the data centre with maybe 35°C inlet rather than 45°C — meaning the DC output is now only 45°C rather than 55°C, and the whole system gradually degrades each cycle. You could address this by mixing some hot output back into the return to keep the DC inlet stable at 45°C, but eh.

[badpun]

European cities are doing it already.

[ramon156]

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

[amluto]

I’ve been to datacenters, but not the huuuge ones people seem to talk about in the context of AI. They are noisy inside (due to air cooling, which is largely avoided by the tech in the OP), but they’re entirely unremarkable outside compared to any other commercial or industrial building. Computers are not inherently loud, nor is power conversion.

Power plants are all over, even in populated areas. They’re not so bad either (except perhaps coal).

There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

[loeg]

On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.

[vablings]

It's like anything else in this world. Corner cutting and being shitty leads to shitty outcomes

[mixdup]

>There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

Sure there is, being a good neighbor costs more than being a bad neighbor

[wolvoleo]

It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive. It is really an issue.

I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.

IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway

[amluto]

> I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.

Right. Vibration propagates through solid (and liquid) materials.

But this can all be measured and controlled, and there's nothing special about datacenters. A building that is hundreds of feet away will couple to your pillow much less strongly than a washing machine in your building. And the washing machine often has a wildly unbalanced load and minimal decoupling between itself and the floor, whereas a big fan in a datacenter or other industrial building ought to be balanced and also ought to be installed on decoupling mounts.

If datacenter operators (cough xAI) are being lazy about properly selecting, installing and maintaining equipment, then you can have a problem. Otherwise you have a much smaller problem.

[thewebguyd]

> IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway

I agree, but that's a hard problem (in the US anyway). Unless you're plopping data centers in the middle of national parks, or in the middle of the desert where water is going to be a problem, you are nearly always going to be within some small mile radius of civilization. Plus the cost of trenching new fiber out in the middle of nowhere.

The same reasons humans want to concentrate in a particular area (access to jobs, infrastructure) are the same things that data centers need.

Once water-less cooling tech like this improves then yeah, just plopping them in the middle of the unpopulated desert becomes viable (assuming you can get the fiber out there and latency is tolerable), so long as they generate their own power.

[dgoldstein0]

The climate requirements to run at this hotter temperature still probably means it'll require more active cooling in the desert during daytime /summers. Assuming we're talking about hotter desert environments like US southwest. That might make your proposal not as economical.

Imo we should just solve the problems with data centers being near cities. Manage/regulate the noise and any waste (heat included, it shouldn't drastically impact the neighbors) and make them pay for any utility capacity/reliability upgrades needed. If this article is right and water usage can be nearly eliminated then it seems like the rest should be solvable? Especially if we can take the extra heat and use it for local power or heating needs.

[VorpalWay]

You might (but probably not) be able to do district heating with this, but electricity generation is not going to be efficient. Heat is a very low grade form of energy, and you need a large differential to drive a turbine efficiently.

If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta. That isn't even enough for district heating, probably not even with heat pumps.

Now if you have something like a steel foundry, that have much hotter cooling water, you can absolutely use the heat for district heating, but even then it usually isn't enough for cost effective electricity generation. Even when it is waste heat, as the equipment to handle it still costs money and requires maintenance.

[naasking]

> It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive.

People said this about high voltage electric lines and wind turbines. Blind tests proved they were imagining things.

[xattt]

Noise is a design choice and could likely be legislated away. Reject heat is different than heating from greenhouse gas effects that are “heating the planet”.

No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

[dgellow]

> No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

In the US

[skybrian]

It sounds like with this liquid cooling, they won’t need the fans?

[stubish]

If the outdoor temperature is cool enough (maybe 30C?), you just pipe the liquid outside through a large enough loop or heat exchanger to get it back down to under 45C. Even better if you can put the loop in a lake and dump the heat there (maybe not better from an ecological POV though). The pumps moving all that liquid becomes the noisiest component.

[zie]

They almost certainly need fans on the outside of the building to cool the 55C water back down to 45C. But correct, no fans on the servers themselves or even in the building. Except perhaps for the humans, so they can stand to work inside the building, when needed.

[michaelt]

Some systems use liquid cooling for the GPU and CPU, but air cooling for the PSU, RAM and SSDs.

With that said, by the standards of industrial sites data centres are quiet, low traffic and smell free. An industrial area that can’t build a data centre certainly can’t build a steelworks or oil refinery or leather tannery.

[energy123]

The humming are the gas turbines which also damages your health.

[rokkamokka]

Couldn't imagine living with the ~55dBA noise literally all the time

[abc42]

Coldest month average temperature where I live is around -7C, with peaks of -35C. Climate change is not going to increase that average, more like decrease. Typically, of course, electricity price is the highest during that month too.

I think we are going to need heating.

[joe_mamba]

>Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming

I don't live next to one but I'd take constant humming over the constant stop/go traffic noise, honking, squeaky brakes, slamming doors and revving engines I now have on my western side of the apartment, thanks to the unemployment office the city opened on my street not too long ago.

So how come constant humming is somehow an illegal nuisance, but we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine?

My parents apartment have constant humming anyway thanks to the HVAC system on the roof of the nearby supermarket and white/brown noise is far more tolerable and easy to tune out than traffic noises.

[drnick1]

> we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine?

For one, there tends to be little traffic at night when most people want quiet in order to sleep. Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept. It is much harder to accept a new source of noise near your home you haven't asked for and don't directly benefit from.

[ChoGGi]

I live nearby a road going down a coulee that dickheads love to speed down in warmer weather at night. I'd trade that for a hum any day.

[b5n]

How dare those nasty, dirty, unemployed live their lives under likely desperate circumstance. They are so much worse than corrupt oligarchs pumping and dumping their way into the greed hall of fame.

[energy123]

More noise categories should be illegal or fined in dense areas, not less

[joe_mamba]

Agree, but data centers are no inside dense areas though.

[energy123]

They're being built in the US next to people's houses with gas turbines

https://xcancel.com/BrianEntin/status/2067930868191035474?s=...

[tucnak]

> the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

So what, winters would be no more? Snow will disappear, no more ice-men and christmas trees, and subzero conditions in general, too?

[reaperducer]

And no more food. Or at least not enough of it to feed very many people.

You do eat, don't you?