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Is there some reason data centers can't/don't use a closed loop cooling system?
I know some data centers are experimenting with closed loops or wastewater systems, but while water is still priced so cheap in the US they are not in a huge rush.
We really need to figure out ways to get big fat data pipes to places that are naturally cold. Like imagine if we could get big pipes to Antarctica and then build data centers there. Plenty of fresh water and cold enough that you could almost just cool it with outside air, and you can exhaust the water right back outside to freeze back up. You could also use the exhaust heat to warm up the living spaces nearby. The o…
Probably not at a large scale, although similar situations have led to odd headlines like 'Florida's manatees are addicted to power plants'.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240328-floridas-manatee...
The internet should be distributed instead we have concentrated the vast majority of it into these “cloud” providers which subsequently hoard the wealth (ie, aws subsidizing the losses of the warehouse division), redistribute local resources to the top C-level executives and shareholders.
Jobs outsourced (or “in sourced”) to people that have no connection. No care about the quality. Only care about fake initiatives and “mission accomplished” type milestones.
> Large data centers are resource hogs, using as much as 5 million gallons of water a day. While this is a lot of water, but as a point of comparison typical golf course uses about 100-200 million gallons of water a year. It's still a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture.
> Large data centers are resource hogs, using as much as 5 million gallons of water a day. While this is a lot of water, but as a point of comparison typical golf course uses about 100-200 million gallons of water a year. It's still a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture.
We really need to figure out ways to get big fat data pipes to places that are naturally cold. Like imagine if we could get big pipes to Antarctica and then build data centers there. Plenty of fresh water and cold enough that you could almost just cool it with outside air, and you can exhaust the water right back outside to freeze back up. You could also use the exhaust heat to warm up the living spaces nearby. The o…
Minor detail: The myriad megajoules of heat which any major DC has got to breathe out...were previously inhaled as electrical energy. And multi-megawatt electrical service is quite difficult to source in most extremely cold places.
But yes, this is a major concern. A few modern nuclear plants would solve the problem, but you'd have to build them. It wouldn't be cheap.
We really need to figure out ways to get big fat data pipes to places that are naturally cold. Like imagine if we could get big pipes to Antarctica and then build data centers there. Plenty of fresh water and cold enough that you could almost just cool it with outside air, and you can exhaust the water right back outside to freeze back up. You could also use the exhaust heat to warm up the living spaces nearby. The o…
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
https://www.wired.com/story/data-centres-underwater-climate-...
https://news.ufl.edu/2024/05/underwater-data-center-security...
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/china-has-star...
If ISPs weren’t so stingy with providing symmetrical, >10 Gbps, connections to residential homes. Then we wouldn’t need to have centralized data centers that consume massive amounts of resources in a specific region. Instead we could have distributed these resources amongst the entire country. Create local jobs (imagine a local “data center” that serves resources to people of {city}, {state}. The internet should be d…
And even though they already have it, they still use AWS for all the control plane work, because it's just so much easier administratively. Admining distributed systems in just a few datacenters is hard enough. Doing it across thousands would be many orders of magnitude worse.
Heck, most companies can't even handle two datacenters.