The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence are so energy hungry that they’re heating up their surroundings, according to new research. It’s an alarming finding given the number of data centers is predicted to explode over the next few years.
Seeing this kind of news hurts. I’ve had a lifelong interest in computers and technology. I’ve made a career of it and live fairly comfortably because of it. But this makes me certain the positives don’t outweigh the negatives. And I wish we could go back to the 90s/2k when we’re certain this tech would lead to the betterment of the world. Sort of bearing my heart here but technology sucks now.
Same, this wave is smearing shit over the technical hobby turned career that I’ve loved since forever that I can remember. My recent desire to rewind and redo makes me feel old AF.
You expressed my own thought better than I could! 'member when Internet was that awesome thing full of promises that allowed people to share knowledge all over the world? Now we just swim in toxicity of all forms. What an absolute mess we made of my favorite technology ever. I poured my life in it, it’s the only thing that ever paid the bills, and now after being laid off for too long I barely have the energy to look for a job because I’ll hate it anyway.
Same. I’m at the point where if I never sat behind a computer again, I think I would be ok with that. Also, video games and their crappy consoles suck now too.
I sometimes work in the building that’s in the thumbnail of the article, that’s crazy to see.
But that being said, data centers are definitely a negative for the environment and using them for bogus AI nonsense is horrible.
You’re absolutely right!
can i have a job
Ain’t anything I can do for ya lol, contact IBEW.
i don’t know what this is
The graphs in the paper show the temperature 1 km away from the data center being 8°C higher and attribute that to heat emitted by the data center. That should start the alarm bells that something isn’t right with this paper.
Here’s a post going into the problems with it;
Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away, the research found, affecting more than 340 million people.
Huh?
Air and water move, especially when heated.
affecting more than 340 million people.
But un a radius of 6 mi? That sounds a bit high.
More close to a city with lots of concrete to store the heat.Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that’s equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.
Edit: and keep in mind, that’s HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that’s heating for over 600,000 people.
Sorry to nitpick but doesn’t 100% of it end up as heat? Vibrations, light, sounds, radio waves- all a tiny fraction of the power are also eventually absorbed by the environment.
That was my understanding at leastYeah but will that happen in the 6M radius that we are talking about?
No, it’ll all happen inside the data center. The problem with that is computers hate all that heat, so they pipe it all away and dump it outside to the best of their ability. The data center may not be 6 miles wide, but then the wind starts blowing the heat around. Hell, even on a perfectly still day, heat would radiate out. They’re making enough heat to keep every single home in a city of 500,000+ people comfortable in winter, so it’s either that or the data center turns into the world’s largest oven.
My understanding is that some tiny portion, like 1-2%, is actually used in a meaningful way to do calculations to do what you want, but that could incorrect. Or it may be that that tiny portion still inevitably turns to heat, just indirectly somehow. I’m not sure, though, you could be right.
All of the energy that does calculations gets turned into heat. The only energy that doesn’t get directly turned into heat is the mechanical energy produced by the fans (which ends up turning into heat), and the electromagnetic radiation (which also ends up turning into heat).
If the calculations didn’t convert energy into heat, a computer would essentially use no power. You can think of a computer like a really complex wire. The power consumption you see is actually the heat loss of that wire. The less heat you lose, the more efficient the wire is.
How did you go from 10% to 1-2%? Please don’t use such precise figures when the source is clearly your ass.
I said over 90% because I couldn’t remember the correct figure. I wanted to be as accurate as I could be with full confidence. If you think something I said was inaccurate, feel free to correct me, but so far, it looks like I was right but could have been more precise if I’d wanted to spend even more time fact checking.
Even a large parking lot has a huge impact on how hot the surrounding area gets. But not 6+ miles away.
A large parking lot takes in heat from the sun and the releases it when the surrounding air becomes cooler. It heats the air, the air rises, new air comes in. A data centre produces heat all on its own, all the time, without ever stopping. It’s the difference between putting a cast iron pan in the sun and just straight up lighting a fire and keeping it burning day and night.
Read those numbers again. A quarter million homes worth of heat, so like 100 homes tall stacked into the same square footage? Or at least 10, I’m not checking my math.
Yeah, a much smaller heat source will produce a much smaller heat bubble. 100 MW is an amount of power that’s difficult to comprehend. A home in the US consumes an average of ~11 MW in an entire year. Every single hour that a 100 MW data center operates, it consumes enough power for a little over 9 homes to run ALL YEAR. Every single day, enough power for almost 225 homes to run for a YEAR. The heat output of a data center is orders of magnitude higher than a parking lot.
Yea this makes the methodology super suspect.
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Yeah. Press X to doubt on this
Why don’t they build glass hydroponic vegetable gardens? The heating is free.
yea
If that 16° in foreign
membersnumbers or freedom units?Edit: autocorrect error
Lol I thought Celsius, would’ve been hell. It’s in Farenheit
That’s still ~9°C, which is a lot.
Mini hell
Sometimes I wish the Epstein class would just mass bomb all us poors already and get it over with. This slow, painful death thing is extremely annoying and stressful.
Just need 1 km wide copper heatsinks
Where do you think the heat from that heatsink eventually goes? The only way to get “rid” of it is into the air or the water.
Woosh!
Sorry, I did not catch onto your expertly crafted joke.
Can they capture that heat and recycle it to partially power the site?
Not really, it’s only useful if you intentionally capture it at the point of heat and Transfer that in a liquid still hot to take it a central point, by the time the fans cool of and the heat is pumped out the building it’s too dispersed to use. Unless you’re in a cold area and low grade heat can be used for warming.
Why don’t we just invent an entropy reversing machine?
Lol I admire your courage to even think reversing the second law of thermodynamics.
They could use it to provide energy for the residents in closer proximity to it (in winter)
That’s what some are already doing.
In Germany I heard about an indoor swimming pool using datacenter heat energy to heat their pools.
It’s ok, Iran will save us!
Heat death any way you look.
Years ago, I was driving through NY city-ish. We pulled over in a rest area and I saw a sign about turning your engine off. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, as did many other people apparently as their cars were idling. Then I got out of my car. I was wrong. The heat was insane. I couldn’t wrap my little head around it. I started doing the engineer math thing because it didn’t make sense.
Doesn’t surprise me at all these massive data centers are creating little heat domes. The cars were bad enough, and they are a fraction of the energy.
100% of electricity burned turns to heat save light that leaves earth. Gigawatt data center? That’s ~650,000 1500w space heaters.
i work for a large power company, we have a data center customer that have as many equally sized cooling towers as one of our nuclear power plants.
Pretty soon you’ll just have nuclear plants just to power data centers.
Come to think of it, you would think power generation would perceptively increase the temperature in the surrounding air and while I have heard of nuclear plants making bays or rivers a few degrees warmer near the plant I don’t think it’s even been described as this bad.
Putting on my ME hat. Power systems are designed to extract the most amount of energy of their fuel sources. This leads for waste heat to not be significantly above ambient temperatures as they have extracted about as much as they can from it.
I assume now many high end servers are now water cooled, so that probably improves their cooling performance of their system, vs the older ways of aisle cooling and having hot and cold sides of the rack.
But unlike power stations, I don’t think the data centers have incentives or the ability to extract much useful work from their waste heat, so I’m sure they are dumping it as fast as they can plus the waste heat from all the secondary systems, cooling, water pumps, etc. are just compounding the local air temps.
You’ll need the same number of cooling towers for the computers too. All the energy created by the reactor will turn into heat, essentially doubling the amount of cooling needed.
I don’t know why they don’t use geothermal cooling, especially with the footprint these things have. Compared to everything else it wouldn’t increase the cost that much, depending on how they do it, and even if it didn’t cover all the cooling needs it would cut down a lot of it.
I have no idea, but I suspect geothermal cooling doesn’t work as well at this scale. I suspect heat in the ground spreads far slower than the air moves. Since these are running 24/7, this means it’ll reach an elevated equilibrium temperature that will be higher than if a residential house did it. I guess if the footprint is large enough it’d be fine, but that’s probably really expensive.
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Didn’t Microsoft try to pay for a nuclear plant to be recommissioned just to power a data centre or something?
There have been several data centers that have bought nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island, they’re going to fire that bitch back up, also the Regulators have been disempowered. Propublica on the last part if I recall.
something tells me Datancenters power needs will exceed that of old nuclear plants, since they are tyring to expand.
Nuclear plants to power data centers to make ai slop to make more need for data centers to feed us ai ad slop…when does it fucking end?
I hope some vigilantes start taking action against these damn wastes of space.
Have you seen the movie Bugonia? I’m nearly convinced that CEO’s are all human looking aliens that are determined to destroy earth and enslave humans. #tinfoilhat #downtherabbithole
The disease is late stage capitalism, the symptom is a mad dash to trade our natural resources for energy and pollution. The mad dash will continue as long as we’re bleeding humanity to keep the shareholders high and dry.
Isn’t the largest data center currently something like 100MW? So “only” 0.1GW…65.000 space heaters is still insane though.
You can have a complex of multiples though and they to congregate near each other for short interconnection.
That currently exist? I believe Colossus is pushing 150MW and aiming for 300. But Gigawatt centers are on the way
I mean, it’s a bit disingenuous to use a GW example in relation to the article, when the largest currently in operation is 0.15GW
we were asked 400MW for a new data center, we told them 100MW is the max we could provide for now, and increase later, we have a new natural gas plant soon to enter operation to replace two retiring coal plants, but looks like we’re postponing decommission targets to keep demand
I’ve had a pretty longstanding belief that a lot of the AI push is to inflate energy demand, as we increasingly add more renewables. In order to keep dirty energy “creating revenue” we need an energy sink to offset any added energy. I think this was crypto, and then NFTs. Those both faded away as soon as the AI stuff started being pushed. I don’t believe this is totally a coincidence.
The planet is fucked.
Oh. I originally put megawatt and thought that was too small so I just incremented the metric exponent.
There’s 33kWh worth of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and they use 0.3gal/hour when idling, so cars are pumping out 11kWh of heat just sitting there…that’s a surprisingly large amount of heat.
33 kWh/gallon * 0.3 gallon/h = 10 kWh/h = 10 kW
But units aside, that is really nothing. The car itself already has about 3 m² area or about 3 kW of sunlight. The issue is the CO2 (globally) and pollution from the car (locally, causing smog etc.).
I rounded a bit (before I miscalculated), there’s 33.7kWh in a gallon and they use 0.35gal/h on average, so they actually use 11.8kWh just idling
I’m not sure what you guys are worried about. All that extra heat will just dissipate into the atmosphere and eventually radiate into space. It’s not like there’s anything in the atmosphere that would interfere with this cycle… right?
couldnt be those pesky gases that likes to trap and reflect heat could it?
And we would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling fossil fuels, and cows too!
And the smoke from the peasants fires will make stars !
Coming to a neighborhood near you, bringing the noise, heat, and higher electric bills.
The noise is the bigger deal.
Have seen the Benn Jordan video?
Funnily enough, it looks like most data centers are built near mini-mansion neighborhoods.
Kinda nice seeing the affluent class have to deal with infrastructure being built at their expense.
Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!
