Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water with the waste heat. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
Money. The answer is always money. If it’s cheaper to build on land they will.
The answer would probably to make a special tax that force them to move to more environmentally friendly locations.
It’s access to electricity and cost of land. People want to live near oceans, so it’s usually more expensive. If you can get dirt price land in Wyoming that has a power plant near it with capacity, you have most of what you need.
So fun fact: Microsoft played around with the idea of Underwater Data Centres and experimented with one off the coast of Orkney.
Here’s their in-house article about it, apparently they were pleased with the results.
Salt water is corrosive.
Yeah. If you live close to the beach, iron stuff rusts quite quickly.
Great lakes then?
No. Nononononononono.
Radiohead?
Microbial corrosion
Data centers are generally built in dry, geologically stable places with few severe storms and cheap power. Coastal areas typically check none of those boxes.
You nailed it. Every time desert data centers are criticized around here there are several BS explanations. You got the correct answers in one sentence.
Waste heat recovery is a thing, and the economics usually work out in your favor if the feed material is really hot. If it’s only mildly warm, you’ll need a lot of machinery to concentrate the heat and raise the temperature to a useful level. At some point, the investment just gets absurd and the idea gets scrapped.
Using heat as heat makes the most sense, since there are fewer steps where you lose some of the heat. Theoretically, you could boil water with server heat, but the massive investment is probably the reason why that isn’t happening everywhere. Running reverse osmosis probably won’t work, because you need electricity for the pumps, and converting heat into electricity comes with significant losses.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to colocate large greenhouses with datacenters. The exhaust temperatures seem compatible with hothouse growing. The heat would still end up in the atmosphere, but at least it could enable growth of fresh local produce first.
It should be a great idea, but I feel like the quantities involved are too vastly different.
I’m seeing estimates of 300kW/hectare (30MW/km² or 77MW/mile²) for heating glasshouses. With individual datacentres frequently confirming multiple gigawatts, the land area required just doesn’t match up.
This is not to say it isn’t worth considering, but it would be a rounding error in the datacentre’s heat output before you ran out of space to build more glasshouses.
There’s a secondary concern of water consumption. You might extend that to ah but what if we could use that to grow the plants too? but the evaporated cooling water out of one of these systems tends to be anything but clean. Maybe that’s a more solvable problem.
Preheat to 60°C using waste server heat, then boil conventionally.
Yes, that helps to lower the total energy cost of boiling the water. It’s better than nothing, but still pretty far from ideal.
Or build in cold climates where they could use geothermal for power and naturally cold air to bring the temps down.
I hear land in Detroit is cheap. As is Northern Canada.
Detroit is not cold in summer. And places that are cold year round are running into issues from global warming and permafrost (I don’t understand the issue, but they exist) without adding local heat.
The main issue with permafrost is instability. If you build on permafrost, when it melts you’ll lose everything that’s not anchored to bedrock. Imagine the ground 3ft below the surface of your street suddenly collapsing, like a sinkhole. At the very least that would ruin the road, the water and sewer pipes, the electricitu and telecom lines, etc. Melting permafrost also releases A LOT of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. (Runaway global warning, anyone?) Lastly, after the permafrost melts, the soil that is left isn’t necessarily suitable for agriculture: it washes away easily and is prone to waterlogging.
Of course, these challenges can be overcome with time and money. It might become worth doing once the current arable land turn into deserts. But the scope of it is huge. We’ll have to invent a whole new type of agriculture.
Detroit is still colder than the Southern US, where many of these data centers are currently being built. Lots of empty land in northern Wyoming and Idaho as well.
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But, but, then they would produce at least something useful. No, that won’t happen.
Both Google and Microsoft tried with actual underwater data centers. It looked like it was feasible, but repairing something when it’s deep underwater was not feasible.
Near water, there will be environmental issues – similar problems to factories and nuclear power plants, debris in intakes and warm water affecting marine life.
Basically, the solution is to build more efficient or less compute-intensive software, but that’s not where we all seem to be heading right now.
Just because something generates heat doesn’t mean that it can boil something. In this case heat pumps would still be needed to concentrate it anyway.
oh don’t worry in 10 years the ocean floor will be full of DCs
Shipping large volumes of water long distances is not generally feasible. Using saltwater to cool has a ton of extra complications as humidity and proximity to saltwater generally drives up costs for things needed to avoid corrosion.
Building in arid areas avoids a lot of costs, building near rivers in low humidity areas is even better.
Computers don’t produce heat high enough to be useful. You want the output temperature the computer cooling to feel like a warm room. That isn’t hot enough to boil water. It isn’t enough hot enough to do anything useful with.
They run at around 70-80 degrees, and that’s WITH cooling. How is that not hot enough to warm up homes. Or taking showers in.
Computers usually shut down for safety at 100c which is the same temp water boils at. Usually even in data centers though, the temps are kept below 75c as compute efficiency drops as temp rises.
It might technically be possible, but would probably be more energy efficient to keep the servers cool, and desalinate with the ‘saved’ energy using RO filters
Ro vs distilation isn’t nearly as clear cut as it appears. Well designed distillation systems recover most of the heat warming the incomming water (cooling the out water). Ro pumps use more energy than you expect at scale. I’m not going to say one is better but don’t discount either without a full analisys of your situation.
Microsoft did that afaik
Then just said ‘no’. Because changing hard HDDs Hard
Microsoft is experimenting with storing their servers underwater. But I couldn’t find anything published in the last year, so god knows what happened to project natick
