161–170 of 190 posts
I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.
Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?
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Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter. Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property. But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when t…
> Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects Then they could pass a law requiring the data centers to pay for these instead of banning them outright, should sort itself out no?
Part of the reason we have big tech getting away with regulatory capture in the US is because they have enough capital to entrench themselves in the economy faster than regulators can react.
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Both an AI hyperscaler and an Amazon warehouse would be typically classified as "light industrial". > There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial. This is typically classified as " heavy industrial "
Maybe for real estate brokers or city planners. I use the definitions that the entire construction industry uses. A data center is commercial. A distribution center is commercial. A plastic injection molding company or machine shop is commercial. An oil refinery, grain mill, or power plant is industrial.
We aren't even trying any more. China and the east are the future.
I'm not convinced that communism is the future. I'm happy to stick with democracy where the government doesn't just force harms on the public whenever it will make them more money and voter's concerns about health and environmental impacts are listened to.
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Both an AI hyperscaler and an Amazon warehouse would be typically classified as "light industrial". > There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial. This is typically classified as " heavy industrial "
Maybe for real estate brokers or city planners. I use the definitions that the entire construction industry uses. A data center is commercial. A distribution center is commercial. A plastic injection molding company or machine shop is commercial. An oil refinery, grain mill, or power plant is industrial.
Stick a feather in your hat and call it macaroni if you want, it doesn't change my prior point.
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Data centers growth is consuming resources far beyond other industrial users. Aluminum smelters use a lot of DC power, but smelters aren't popping up like VC fertilized mushrooms.
Not really the point. Should we have separate laws for stealing from grocery stores, electronics stores and drug stores because they have different characteristics?
A new aluminum smelter, dirty as they are, wont double your electric bill and will employ far more people than a datacenter (other than ex-marines w/ shoot to kill orders, who works there?)
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I'm not convinced that communism is the future. I'm happy to stick with democracy where the government doesn't just force harms on the public whenever it will make them more money and voter's concerns about health and environmental impacts are listened to.
Great. Solve our problems with politics while china solves it with technology.
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Amazon can just mix in more water post cooling and then by your metric the problem would be solved. They can just rely on dilution like the farmers do. Or we can use our brain and actually hold the right people accountable.
I'm finding it interesting to reason about this subject, not being a geologist and what not. It seems that there is a relatively stable rate at which the farms output nitrates regardless of how much water Amazon pumps from the aquifer. The issue RollingStone seems to have identified is that as Amazon pulls more water, it effectively concentrates the solutes by evaporating some of the water. As a result, less water go…
The total amount of nitrates is basically the same. Where those nitrates ended up and at what concentrations is what changed once amazon came into the picture. People had clean drinkable water before amazon's data center. They'd have had to deal with the soil contamination eventually, but by forcing the pollution into their clean water supply and increasing the concentration of it amazon's data center made their water undrinkable.
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> The obvious answer to everyone's concerns is to build them in unused buildings in cities that already have infrastructure to support them. This is the problem. These are mostly old office buildings. They are not designed to supply that much electricity and water on each floor. These racks and equipment also weigh a lot and the building floors and building itself probably isn't rated for that. Not only that, but to…
Around here they are cutting down forests. Sometimes even protected forests without getting permits, trying to beg for forgiveness after the fact. They don't need to maximize every inch of the building, if that means less capacity then so be it. As far as water and power, that's why I mentioned in cities that already have capacity. Or at least the ability to run new lines without digging up the roads, because they ha…
I'm not sure those exist in any meaningful number.
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"Data centers in space makes no sense", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105 "Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390781
There is plenty of scientific literature on the topic of cooling hot materials in space. Moreover, the research is not finished -- it will continue to progress. I surveyed the current works, and put together a video to communicate the salient points:
https://youtu.be/s7Mv_OcBXI8 ⤷ Engineering Constraints of Orbital Space-Based Compute: Heat Rejection and more