81–90 of 100 posts
All data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
and AI deniers were saying we were gonna get boiled like frogs, instead we got free heated swimming pools, wait a minute ...
(Edited to add: there are several examples of public swimming pools being heated with Low T geothermal heat in the Perth metropolitan region of Western Australia.)
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The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed, because there's not enough electricity and there isn't enough grid power and exhaust filtering costs money. So they're giving entire nearby towns asthma. They're also so loud the whole town can't sleep. Data centers were, and still can be, some of the cleanest industrial facilities - but the ones being buil…
> The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed That’s every local investigative journalist’s wet dream. Can you link us to a source please? PS saw an interview with he who shouldn’t be named and they made an interesting point that there isn’t a way to scale the manufacturing of gas turbine blades, there will never be enough gas turbines for these DCs t…
Something I have been wondering: Why don't data centres use the excess heat for a sort of energy recuperation, turning at least some of it back into electricity?
Because it's not economical, the required hardware is unlikely to pay for itself during its lifetime. The gradient is too small (~50C), which means low Carnot efficiency. Additionally, extraction of low-enthalpy energy involves obstruction of heat transfer, meaning lower cooling efficiency. It may have been a different story if we had computer hardware able to efficiently operate at 200-300C. Even steel plants which…
Do I see a market opening here?
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Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: "It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people."
Doesn't "tanks" imply some sort of composting operation, rather than burning bodies?
All data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
Surely it's just cheaper to build further away from residential areas? For this to work you'd need to be close to residential areas, but that's where you get the most NIMBY opposition. And if the datacenter is in the middle of some industrial park, who would want to drive 30 minutes to an industrial park to have a swim?
There's plenty of free parking, free admission, giant pool with some small waterslides and stuff, a bunch of picnic tables and public barbecues, generally some nice greenery and trees for shade, ponds and fountains and stuff, a bandstand, etc.
It's not somewhere you'd pop over to for a "quick swim", but especially for lower income people it's a great place to have around as a "grab a pack of hotdogs and your swim trunks and make a day of it" sort of thing. As a kid we couldn't afford to, say, go to the actual waterslide park or anything so I have a lot of fond memories of visiting the steel plant.
I'm sure the construction and upkeep was less than a rounding error in terms of construction and upkeep costs for the plant itself.
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Rather than pools specifically, maybe they could design District Heating systems.
I was thinking more like if they externalized the heat release of the data centers enough they might even be able to heat the whole globe!
I don't understand how a server (the "washing-machine-sized datacenter") can heat up any fraction of a swimming pool appreciably. Wouldn't it be a few kW tops?
And more importantly, once the pool is warm enough (or in a very hot day), doesn't it lose its cooling efficiency?
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> The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed That’s every local investigative journalist’s wet dream. Can you link us to a source please? PS saw an interview with he who shouldn’t be named and they made an interesting point that there isn’t a way to scale the manufacturing of gas turbine blades, there will never be enough gas turbines for these DCs t…
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/4/whitehous... not quite local investigative journalism but should suffice
"Mississippi officials told xAI it could run the generators without an air permit because they were deemed “temporary” and “mobile” units.". Makes sense because as far as i can tell they were on trailers.
but then there's this: "But lawyers at the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the NAACP in the federal lawsuit, have long maintained that such a loophole doesn’t exist, and that running such turbines without a permit violates the federal Clean Air Act.
“Mobile, temporary, portable, whatever you want to call them, turbines need air permits,” Patrick Anderson, a center attorney, told Mississippi Today."
as per typical, it's not clear who's right
https://mississippitoday.org/2026/04/15/data-center-turbines...
All data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
Even smaller data centers will be producing enough waste heat to heat 10s of thousands of homes. So why not make residents love you by funding the installation of a district heating system which gives your compute power a symbiotic relationship with the community. Their energy bills go down naturally because your cooling efforts are heating their homes and cooling their homes and you spend less in the winter cooling your servers because that heat is being distributed throughout the community.
It doesn't even have to be free district heating/cooling, just cheaper than using electric or gas heaters.