- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Once again I am shocked that you always have these big ass heat exchangers on these data centers but no talk of even trying to use some of the waste heat to offset the power use.
They are wasteful on purpose. they could have closed circuit cooling systems where they condense the water from the vapor and reuse it. But they are a giant middle finger to all of us.
Nah, evaporation removes multiple times more heat than regular air cooling. It’s because water has high specific heat
Water is cheaper to waste than electricity unfortunately.
Pretty sure most modern data centers are using closed loop cooling or refrigeration. Not evaporative cooling.
You can’t condense the water either that would defeat the point of evaporating it in the first place. Closed loop liquid cooling does not involve boiling or evaporation. You are just pumping a liquid around a circuit. It’s not just water either it’s more like a car antifreeze.
Got any info to back that up? Here’s a screenshot from page 39 of the US Data Center Energy Usage Report, which shows the use of closed loop systems (which they call dry cooling) as one of the smallest percentages of cooling types used. Pretty sure you’ve got it completely backwards on the types of cooling used, and I know for a fact the massive Amazon data center out in Oregon uses evaporative, because you can’t drink the water there as a result.
This shows the percentage of specific types of data centers but fails to mention how many are in each group, and what the cooling systems used on the most recently built data centers are. Right now AI specialized data centers are what are popping up everywhere with massive scale and that chart specifically shows that most use some form of closed loop cooling? Did your report show specific numbers of those datacenters per category and the energy/heat generated? Otherwise just a base percentage of each type obscurs a lot of context here.
High power density = high cooling demnds
The laws of thermodynamics? Can’t create or destroy energy and overall entropy increases over time. A closed loop (or any cooling system) just moves heat away from the hot thing. So yes, they can be used as much as any other cooling system but it won’t stop the issue of “generating lots of heat”. That heat still needs to go somewhere. Dumping it into the atmosphere might be the best option if there’s nothing in the area that needs heat. Should probably build them next to steel plants or something like that. Then a closed loop would be better.
I never said it fixed the issue of generating heat. Heat isn’t really a major problem as far as I am concerned. I thought we were talking about water use.
Fair enough, I thought we were talking about the heat lol.
? OP was claiming that the majority of data centers use closed loop/refrigeration systems and I was pointing out that US data shows the vast majority use evaporative cooling. They posted a few comments pushing that idea which is why I refuted that. I’m not sure what the point you’re trying to make is in regards to those two statements. I’m not disputing the accuracy of what you’re saying, just unsure of where you’re going with it.
Thought your request to back it up was in response to the parent comment saying that condensing the water defeats the purpose rather than the first paragraph.
Why would they call closed loop liquid cooling “dry cooling”? Unless they explicitly said that then I don’t believe you to be honest.
Evaporative cooling wouldn’t make the water undrinkable unless something has gone very wrong. So I don’t think what you are saying about Oregan is true either.
This is also only representative of the USA, not worldwide. I get that much of the world doesn’t have many datacenters compared to the USA, but you at least have to include China and the EU.
Just a talking point in an investors report. The more I read on these centers the more I am convinced they are not built to work.
The guy you are replying to doesn’t actually know jack about data centers. Plenty do use closed loop cooling which doesn’t involve evaporating water. It’s only a minority that use evaporative cooling. Power stations are more likely to use evaporative cooling (hence big towers with steam clouds) than datacenters are. They also use far more cooling water than datacenters do. Both pale in comparison to agriculture and other uses.
Nebius is doing it in Finland
They could boil seawater, condense the steam into drinking water
its more expensive since you will need to deal with corrosion and heat degrading the equipment overtime.
my crazy ass idea since 2015:
let’s install mini data centers on residential buildings:
- use excess heat to get hot water for pavement heating in winter and get hot water for domestic usage
- buildings get free high speed fiber
- local edge servers
- employ local people for maintenance
cons:
- management hell, but if small teams get split locally in quarters/towns then I don’t see problems
Some people making datacenter looks into way to recycle the extra heat, some uses it to heat local area (willingly). But all of this costs more than just, dumping it out, I guess.
Phoenix. What are you going to do with it in Phoenix? 24/7 saunas?
If Phoenix has heavy Industries, piped steam is often useful. There’s also central heating (just hot water eg for cooking, bathing, dishwasher etc.), however this requires prior design.
Then there’s a better option to have the chimney higher up so the hot air doesn’t impact downstream.
It’s not rocket science but it’s not free of cost either
Waste heat is high entropy alredy. You can’t extract any meaningful energy out of it.
Ah yes, famously we have never been able to do anything with heat energy…
It’s not my fault you don’t understand physics and think that all heat=free energy. You can’t extract shit without big temperature difference.
Yeah if only you had enough excess heat in one area to increase the local temperature of an already very hot place by 4 degrees.
If you plug the numbers into the Carnot equation, it looks like the maximum theoretical efficiency of a thermoelectric generator or heat engine operating at that temperature gradient is about 0.75%. And, I could be wrong, but my assumption would be any attempt to reclaim that energy would slow its exchange and potentially bottleneck a cooling system to some extent.
The issue is you are using 4 degrees as the delta of temp, when that is the ambient area temp change. The very localized heat being generated on site (and already nicely conveyed in heat management systems) is going to be a lot more then 4. Also why would you be always using a thermometric generator? They are not know to be efficient.
Good point about the local temperature delta… I kind of lost sight of that in the discussion. But my understanding of that equation is it would be the maximum theoretical efficiency of any thermal generator as it represents an idealized heat engine.
I mean good, we should do everything possible to make these data centers as unnefficient as they are unnecessary.
4 degrees Fahrenheit is nothing. For all practical energy production puropses it’s worthless
Americans simply don’t give a shit.
No, whiny clown about to reply, I don’t care if you’re “one of the good ones.” You STILL don’t give a shit.
Okay wiz, I’ll bite. While I’m working 60 hours a week, raising awareness online, and attending City council meetings, what else would you like me to fucking do? Mail them a pipe of dynamite?
Everyone has a job. You aren’t special.
Attending city council meetings and raising awareness are things you should be doing in the BEST of times. That’s called participation in democracy. If you think that’s all that’s called for right now in the US, I don’t know what to tell you.
Hey don’t lump me in with those whiny clowns! I’m a whiny clown in a clown suit. Damn foreigners making extremely generalized assumptions about us /s
Typical waste in the USA. I believe Sweden or Finland pump the heat out for residential use.
I don’t think the main problem of Phoenix is the lack of heating
Use it to heat water for home use and a desert does become cool at night.
You need hot water in Phoenix, don’t you?
This will help fighting the global colding we’ve had going on… wait, something’s off. Am I reading the charts upside down again?
“Data centers are inherently an important part of our society, and they’re going to become even more necessary going forward,”
God, fuck this shit
Right?
Like, says who and on what historical basis? People said similar shit about crypto and we all know how that turned out.
You literally are using a data center or several to post this. How do you think the internet works?
Not the same type of data centre.
The majority of datacenters and datacenter power consumption are not for AI. Before AI no one cared about datacenters. Still no one cares about datacenters that already existed and make up the majority of datacenters. I don’t understand it. Is this just manufactured outrage?
People hate data centers because they are being forced into our communities without our consent. Consent. Consent.consent
Most datacenters are not in urban communities they are in industrial zones.
You also don’t need the consent of other people to build things on land you own. Get out of here with this shit.
C’mon bro put 2 and 2 together, you can do it
What do you want me to put together? Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean instead of beating around the bush?
Please don’t be obtuse on purpose. It’s not helpful to anyone
How is this being obtuse?
Disingenuous
So running a community forum on a decade old laptop, or someone using a hand-me-down phone to watch videos are equal to openAI’s stargate hyperscaler?
We don’t classify a laptop a data centre just because it was repurposed as a web server, and furthermore, devices are so powerful today that you could probably do the same on a smart watch.
Either you don’t know what a data centre is, or are intentionally skewing the definition of “data centre” to fit your snarky reply.
YouTube requires enormous amounts of data center hardware. Do you have any idea how much video data they injest, transcode, and distribute in even just an hour or a minute? It’s not very economical to run actually and they had major problems even breaking even.
Most large Lemmy instances run on cloud services nowadays. So they rely on a datacenter somewhere. I am well aware you can self-host - I have done so for multiple things including AI models and tools - but that’s a minority of Lemmy users. Most are using public instances which are hosted on servers in the cloud. In fact if you read the deployment guide for Lemmy it is meant to be deployed using cloud native technology.
You also don’t need a whole Stargate to host one users AI usage. You don’t even need a whole server. Typically AI servers process requests from multiple users simultaneously. The actual marginal cost of each user is relatively small, hence why people can and do run local AI models.
You literally are using a data center or several to post this. How do you think the internet works?
Not only that… but Lake Tahoe is being abandoned by their power company to power data centers because its more profitable.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/
How is that even allowed
I don’t know, but it sets a dangerous precedent.
Its a travesty, but in that case a little more strange. The blame is not just on the power company but also the local government, the company was bought in 2009 and told the community it would be winding down providing power in the area. The local government got a few extensions but now they have “better” customers they are not going to give them any more. So for many years the area knew it had this issue to deal with but like a lot of americans just sat on their asses and said nothing could be done.
As to why this is allowed, simple, it is a power company existing in a system where profit is the sole factor in anything.
2009 was 17 years ago, they had so much time
I think part of the issue is they did not really try, it looks like they just assumed things would stay the same. The other part is how would they get another provider? I assume they could get one but for how much more?
That’s fucking WILD
It doesn’t set a precedent at all. It’s always been like this.
Now just more people are being effected by it and in places that people actually give a fuck about. So it’s news now.
Mind throwing out a source? Having some trouble searching for other places that have experienced this kinda thing, with how fucked search has gotten. All I can find are articles about company towns, which don’t feel like what you’re referring to.
Free market economy. You could technically do similar with nordpool. Set up a ridiculous power consumer and watch everyone’s prices go up.
Insanity.
Thank you for linking.
I recently watched a video about the first electronic synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and was housed in the basement of an entire city block in NYC. Several decades later, and it would fit in a suitcase, with far more functionality. It worked, but it was huge and unwieldly, to the point of being completely impractical. It needed to wait until the technology caught up to it, and made it a truly viable instrument, and not just a concept.
Data Centers are like that 1897 synthesizer. It works, sure, but at what cost? It’s expensive in every way, from the building costs, the energy costs, the environmental costs, etc. We have a concept and a prototype, but not a truly viable product yet. Maybe in a decade or two, with a proper goal in mind, we can get there, but right now, Data Centers are just that big, dumb synthesizer that takes up a city block.
Ah but that’s where you’re mistaken. The electronic Synthesizer actually had a use. Data centers are a waste the whole way around, and they always will be.
Valid.
(Noun.) (Noun.) ?
You don’t know what a noun is do you?
Person, place, or thing. Space can also be a noun.
space, noun, outside earth’s atmosphere
I thought this was the meaning of space in space billionaires? Billionaires who pour a lot of money into going to space?
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/space_1?q=space
A verb is a doing word, so it is saying to space the billionaires, as in to throw them out in airlock into space. It’s got nothing to do with whether or not the billionaires are active in the space industry or not.
I got that, I was referring to the first panel (adjective noun).
Yes but in figure 1 it’s a noun modifying another noun. Like police car siren. Police and car aren’t adjectives in that example.
The term you might be looking for is adjunct noun, where a noun modified another noun by acting as an adjective, as-in chicken soup, or cat food.
Good thing it’s not hot in Phoenix.
A Karren has their own special way to do this no matter what.
Well they don’t believe in global warming but perhaps they’ll believe in local warming.
No karen really lives laughs and loves. They brood frown and hate.
Who the fuck builds a data center in Phoenix?! Was the surface of the sun not available?
They don’t give a fuck about us. Phoenix likely gave tax breaks, energy deals etc
Seems hard to believe that those would outweigh the like 30 degree average temperature difference of building it some place like Glasgow Montana.
The cooling water evaporates real nice in the desert tho
I didn’t think about evaporative cooling for some reason, how much water will that use?
The republicans are also gutting our national parks and selling them off.
Big cuts and sweeping changes have destabilized the National Park Service and its core missions.
National parks facing ‘nightmare’ under Trump, warns ex-director of service
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
I’ll never forgive NPS leadership, the pace at which they moved to follow illegal orders was astounding. HR moved faster than ever before to hire people when they are the ones that know best how to slow things down.
Not a single person in a position of power pushed back in anyway way. I’m not even talking about defying orders here. They didn’t even use existing policy to slow things down. There are mechanisms and choices that could have been made, but they didn’t do it.
Not a single person in a position of power
I agree with you, but I think it’s important to point out that the people in power from his first term and now, are trump sychophants or direct placements by republicans. They didn’t do anything because they didn’t want to.
Not true, he appointed the Secretary (who also appoints the Director) yes but truthfully they do basically none of the work. The non-political civilian service employees do the work. Think regional directors (not politically appointed), heads of regional HR, and park superintendents.
These people had the ability to slow things down, and they chose not to. At best a few people resigned and interim leadership stepped in to carry out orders. These interim leaders were already NPS employees various Chiefs and Deputies of different branches (regional and parks).
These are people that have been in the park service 20+ years. Hell I saw a few of them break down and cry, and yet they kept the agendas rolling.
Policy alone lets you take 3 sick days in a row with no doctors note. At least do that much to slow it down
This is such an affront to the nation, its history, and its people, it is shocking that there isn’t more outrage about this. But then again there’s not nearly enough outrage to go around to cover all the constant bullshit.
The republic is being DDOSed with bullshit. It’s a fucking smash and grab and the looters are just running wild at the moment, before our eyes.
I hope whoever is in office next is absolutely cutthroat about demagafication and goes after every company and individual profiting off of this with the full fury of RICO and anti-trust laws to reclaim America’s national parks.
It’s the secret government weather weapon they were talking about! It is real!
Debating a data center IMO is the same as debating a Nazis right to exist. They should’ve been stopped before they could get going and now that its too late to stop them we just gotta kill them instead.
They raised the surrounding temperature in fucking Phoenix Arizona? A place already so hot that it can kill you within hours. we’re so fucked.
Good thing climate change isn’t real or we’d be in BIG trouble!
Yeah… that would be bad…
No one in Phoenix will notice. If you’ve stuck around in Phoenix this long you’ve managed to stop caring about temperatures not fit for human life
But you will notice the lack of water…
Eventually. Maybe sooner than we think.
Phoenix has been insisting there’s 100+ years of water under the mountains, etc. for decades. But every time there’s been any sort of effort to verify, it gets killed either by the government or courts on various ways.
Phoenix also loves to concrete over absolutely every open area, removing natural heat sinks into the ground. It’s one of the big reasons the Phoenix area is as hot as it is and maintains that heat overnight instead of actually cooling a bit like other cities in the Sonoran Desert region.
Tucson here: I thought I’d like to move to Phoenix for the big city convinces. After staying overnight at a friend’s house, I can solidly say that the difference in the summer is insane. It’s a whole new level of heat. It’s doable, but shit, it’s not a joke if you’re unprepared.
The heat island effect is not an exaggeration. The lows in Phoenix in the summer are higher than the highs in even warm climate cities.
Yeah Tucson has a lot of blank spaces spread throughout the city when you actually get down to the street level. Lots of open areas for the heat to be absorbed by the earth rather than just getting trapped in concrete and asphalt everywhere.
It’s kinda hilarious that poverty and bad business sense made those empty spaces and it works out as a net positive.
I really don’t get that. Every desert I’ve lived in, as soon as the sun went down the temperature dropped like ten, maybe twenty frankfurters. Phoenix just stays hot and that definitely seems engineered
Yeah that’s what deserts do.
But Phoenix isn’t a desert anymore, it’s a big concrete pad that works just like any rock you put into a hot space… it absorbs heat through the day then radiates it back out once the sun is down. They replaced the desert but didn’t leave holes for it to still work the same.
Nothing better than a concrete/asphalt desert in the middle of the summer with zero shade.
Maybe. I assume they’ve all evolved into lizard-people by now.
Already a lack of thar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE
Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?
The family exits the car
Bobby: Oh my God! It’s like standing on the sun!
Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance!
EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)
I stay here because I have family here. I hate the weather with a passion. Let’s not make it even worse.
I wonder how muchv it raises from you know, ever multi giga watt power plant?
Suppose it depends how much gas they each fire to keep the slop boiling
Sadly we actually need power plants, the Data Centers though are trash.
