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.
  • NoTagBacks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2 hours

    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?

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 minutes

      And we would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling fossil fuels, and cows too!

  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2 hours

    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.

    • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2 hours

      100% of electricity burned turns to heat save light that leaves earth. Gigawatt data center? That’s ~650,000 1500w space heaters.

      • expatriado@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 hour

        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.

        • tehn00bi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3 minutes

          Pretty soon you’ll just have nuclear plants just to power data centers.

      • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1 hour

        Isn’t the largest data center currently something like 100MW? So “only” 0.1GW…65.000 space heaters is still insane though.

        • expatriado@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 hour

          we were asked 400MW for a new data center, we told them 100MW is the max we could go for now, and could increase later, we have a new natural gas plant soon to enter operation to replace two retiring coal plants, but looks like we’re extending decommission targets to keep demand

        • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1 hour

          Oh. I originally put megawatt and thought that was too small so I just incremented the metric exponent.

    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1 hour

      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.

      • Eheran@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 hour

        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.).

  • Bitflip@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1 hour

    Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!

  • Reygle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13 minutes

    What’s the long/short term on burning them to the ground

  • Antaeus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29 minutes

    Sigh… wasting power, wasting nand chips, hard drives and for what? Aiding climate change.

    But at least we can have a hallucinating chatbot.

  • rabber@lemmy.caEnglish
    29 minutes

    As a lifelong datacenter tech it really sucks seeing what monster this has all become. And I don’t know what else I would do to pay the bills.

  • tidderuuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 hour

    This is perfectly timed because WA states legislature ended their session this year and decided not to take up the topic of regulating data centers. Even better knowing that the PNW just had the warmest winter in history, record low snowpack and nearly every month a new mega data center is opening.

  • Switorik@lemmy.zipEnglish
    57 minutes

    Big brain moment. If we stop monitoring it, then problem doesn’t exist.

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 hours

    The findings are particularly alarming, the scientists say, because AI data centers are set to boom over the next few years

    Citation needed, CNN. This is a good reason not to build them, but right now, data center construction is stalling:

    Only 5GW of data center construction is actually in progress globally at this time.

    …and may this trend continue.

    • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      They are basing it on all the component manufacturers who said everything they produce for the next two years will be going to data centers.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        18 minutes

        I want to say CNN should know better than to just trust them at their word, but it’s CNN…

        • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
          6 minutes

          I think multiple large memory and storage manufacturers publicly saying the same thing is about as reliable as it can get.