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Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

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Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#271

Post by ryanisnan »

kennywinker wrote: post #146
WarmWash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

What a weird line to draw. Data centres do a lot more than what you report. E.g. they might host your electronic health records. They might host census data, or weather data, or your kid's school learning management system.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#272

Post by lokar »

nemomarx wrote: post #4

Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?

When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer.

I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.

For me, noise would be my first concern

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#273

Post by whimsicalism »

dwoldrich wrote: post #35

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…

It's trumped up, pretty obviously. We basically low-growthed our way into a default sort of NIMBYism by the mid-90s and now there is pressure to build anything again and we are seeing the reaction.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#274

Post by somehnguy »

Symbiote wrote: post #255
fourseventy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reas…

All of those are the old, smaller scale.

Can you elaborate on the scale difference?

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#275

Post by whimsicalism »

kennywinker wrote: post #146
WarmWash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

"i can't eat a cargo container so it's useless" -guy who can only see one level up the chain of abstractions that allow him to fill his belly.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#276

Post by magicalist »

ben_w wrote: post #242
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…

When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.

Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#277

Post by whimsicalism »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #263
WarmWash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

To be completely honest, normal people being able to set their AC to a sane temp does sound very valuable, and probably totally worth slowing down the slop machines a little bit.

what if rather than enumerating the list of allowed/disallowed economic activities based on some moral criterion, we just tax the rich and redistribute it. i kinda thought this is what we spent the entirety of the 20th c. litigating but maybe i'm mistaken

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#278

Post by jplusequalt »

ben_w wrote: post #242
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…

Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#279

Post by Ydarbleoj »

fourseventy wrote: post #248
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reas…

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.

One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#280

Post by dylan604 »

lenerdenator wrote: post #241
dylan604 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?

Well, to a point. I honestly don't get why, for example, we're building anything that requires a lot of water in Arizona.

Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
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