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Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
It’s not their water, so they don’t care. When it finally runs out, they’ll just go somewhere else.
I mean, sure, that’s their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there’s no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build
That’s someone else’s problem. Hopefully someone after they’re dead, but as long as they have their golden parachute, who cares?
True but this isn’t specific to the tech bubble. It’s a feature of capitalism. Competition forces firms to adopt shorter term horizons. If a firm has significant profit to make by focusing on the short term and it does not, its competitor would. If the profit possoble within this period is significant, having the competitor collect it runs the risk of the current firm failing, or the competitor accumulating enough for hostile takeover, among other failures. That would stop the current firm onwer from collecting profits in the future. Even if focusing on the long term is more profitable over time, firms may not survive in a competitive environment to realize long term profits. These are some of the fundamental processes that drive firms into short term horizons. With liquid asset markets there are even more immediate processes driving firms into short term planning.
Add to that planning based mainly on prices, which don’t capture a ton of reality and you get situations like a water hungry datacenter in the desert, cause the price of water does not capture its long term availability for example.
All of this has happened in the past, even a century ago. It’s happened and keeps happening in other industries too. For example the fossil fuel industry.
That’s more an artifact of modern corporate structure where a publicity traded entity must always be growing or it will be considered a failure.
They’re locusts. They don’t think about anything past the next fiscal quarter.
That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?
Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
I don’t understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
Closed loop watercooling is really just air cooling with extra steps. The water is heated by the devices and cooled by a large radiator with fans. Or it’s cooled with a chiller which in turn is cooled by a radiator with fans.
Replacing the water is the most effective (yet wasteful) way to remove the heat.
I once saw a spa that was using a liquid cooled bank of computers to heat their pool water. It involves a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger so they’re not pumping chlorinated pool water through their servers but…I wish we did more of that. Server farms are a source of heat, lots of other things need heat.
To a point, yes. While you’re still using air to cool the water, I think it’s still a little more efficient than blindly keeping the server room at a low-ish temperature.
Keeping the server room cool is just using an air conditioner which is cooled by a radiator with a fan, and then using that cooled air to cool another radiator with a fan. Every step is a loss of efficiency.
The main advantage of water loops is that you get to use a different form factor for the radiator and fan by moving it away from the source of heat and aren’t limited by the case dimensions.
Because they got fuck-you money.
Said in another comment, our deserts are tectonically stable and free of natural disasters. If you want redundant DCs, picking one on the desert is a good bet.
Yeah, all we got is man made tragedy of the commons disasters where the data centers deplete not only the water for humans, but the water for the data centers. Poof, no more data.
I’m more worried about humans draining our aquifers that took thousands, even millions, of years to fill. That water is no more replaceable than oil.
Good. This whole thing was stupid when the local government and utilities keep telling us little people to conserve water because, well we’re in a 113 degree desert with a complete lack of water due to climate change and they wanted to do this bullshit.
Have you tried collecting the condensation off the glass? If you use that to wash your armpits you can go an extra day before you shower so Jeff Bezos can make numbers go up in his theoretical money.
Edit: “Comical” thought. There is less than $2.5 trillion in cash circulating.
That wouldn’t cover 20 people net worth in a country of near 350,000,000.
Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.
I doubt a microchip that doesn’t need cooling, while still calculating reasonably fast, is possible.
It’s possible if you make it a macrochip instead of a microchip.
Why are data centers so thirsty anyway? Can’t cooling systems just reuse water in a closed loop?
Evaporative cooling needs less water mass and less surface area for the same cooling effect. They could simply use bigger heat sinks outside the building and have a bigger water cooling system to make it closed loop, but they don’t want to do that.
Then why the fuck do they keep wanting build them in the middle of the desert then?
Cheap land, dry air is good for evaporative cooling, and many arid areas have a surprising amount of ground water. It ultimately comes down to being the cheapest option, not the smartest or best option.
So how long to the billionaires have that entire city council replaced with people who are in their pocket and will vote for its passing?
In the states? 1-2 years tops.
Trump will have them arrested on terrorism charges in a month…after a totally coincidental delivery of a golden idol to trump, from bezos
edit I said this as a joke, and later found Apple recently gifted Trump a golden idol.
God I miss when satire was silliness, and not psychic future sight.
Externalization of cost, the environment and community bears the cost instead of the corporation. Privatize the profits, externalize the costs.
In addition to the other answers;
America’s deserts are tectonically stable and don’t experience natural disasters. If you want your data and/or compute running in two regions for redundancy, somewhere in the desert is a good choice for one of your DCs.
Maybe in AZ or other states but CA deserts are not tectonically stable.
I know. Was looking for a term to separate the two areas. Not like the San Andreas fault is stable!
How could I have dialed that in better?
Probably some ecological or geologic zone that would be precise but I don’t know.
Because the local and state governments in those deserts keep promising them unlimited water for nearly free
Then local governments need be strung up. Tar and feathered and hung from the largest tree in the state.
Demand, ain’t much of it in the desert. Also, easy to manipulate governments.
Two more reasons not yet mentioned:
It is close to a population center (Phoenix) keeping latency low to customers. Getting customers off the public Internet quickly and into your private network fast is best for a lot of reasons.
Cheap and abundant solar power. Data centers are extremely power hungry and power lines are expensive so companies like Amazon almost always secure abundant power rights before building. Google built their first data center in The Dalles Oregon because an aluminum smelter had gone belly up and left a bunch of capacity unclaimed in a local hydroelectric dam.
They absolutely can run closed loop. It does not cool as well as evaporative cooling (it takes MASSIVE heat to evaporate water) but it can work if designed right with large system capacity and big radiators. Trouble is it’s likely more expensive than pissing away the water and we know all that matters is bottom line.
No, usually the water doesn’t cool down fast enough. Trying to reuse it just slowly heats it up, until either the water or the servers evaporate.
their servers evaporating sounds like a good deal to me
usually the water doesn’t cool down fast enough
…in the time chosen. If the planet can get down to 13c overnight, I bet Skippy’s relatively smaller data centre can get down sooner with a proper loop.
I know it’s hard finding a good spot of flat land now that the choicest spots have all been fracked for methane and are no longer stable - thanks, ‘green’ energy shysters! - but what else were ya gonna do with all that space under the solar panels?
By-product? Free showers for the homeless with that waste heat. Yay?
This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.
Also a good showcase on why you should care about your local elections. Vote for people who will protect your interests, like these folks.
I guess that , unlike some famous people in “Phoenix Valley”, the people in Tucson did not forget “the white man’s greed”.
Kudos to them!
Well fine, guess I’ll have to make my obese fart videos the old fashioned way. Anyone seen my kimchi?
