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?
Low humidity. Good for longevity of electronics, and makes the evaporative cooling more efficient. So it’s a matter of the benefits of that vs. the cost of the added heat.
Land is also relatively cheap.
Farms, now data centers? Let’s add a Nestlé water or coca Cola factory.
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
Because closed loops are more expensive in the short term, making it a non-starter
I guess water is cheep enough.
Still kinda obnoxious though. Like they couldn’t see that the ultra high water usage was the thing that would get the most pushback from?
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.
They building a new data center in the bay area California that is struggling for water all the time. But its OK they are building it upstream towards the reservoir so they can get first dibs
So that one’s not too worried about the tectonic stability thing, then.
I wonder if they could use sea water for that. I know salt is corrosive, but surely there’s a reasonable solution there.
I remember there was talks about a floating data center in the ocean.
I’d much rather have underwater data centers. A floating data center seems like a massive eyesore and you’d need to run cables out there.
If you build one underground near the shore and then channel water in from the ocean, it should be much less intrusive.
It still has problems. Mainly you need to get power out there and the heated exhaust water can mess with the ecosystem.
Right, by “near the shore” I meant a land-based facility with access to sea water. Heated exhaust water could also be used in a local desalinization plant to produce fresh water for maximum efficiency.
seawater would probably corrode whatever storage system they have in there overtime, all that biological material, chemicals and gunk.
Sure. A lot of that can be filtered out, but there will be corrosion with whatever heat transfer system they use. However, seawater is free, pretty consistently cool temperature (esp. in the Pacific), and is plentiful, so replacing some heat exchange components shouldn’t be overly burdensome.
It’s not like they’re dunking the electronics in the water. They just need to filter it enough it doesn’t clog up the system and run it in a closed loop.
If I can have a closed loop with a reservoir for my home PC, motherfucking Amazon can build a water storage tank for their cooling.
But that would require large capital investments that negatively impacts earnings reports.
Much better to screw over the people by taking their water for free.
Sure, but that means more space to allow for cooling the water so it can be reused. If you can cycle it w/ “unlimited” cool water from the ocean, it can be a lot more compact, and heated waste water could potentially be used by a desalinization plant to improve freshwater output.
Nuclear plants do that with lakes, they suck in cool water from one end and dump out the hot water at the other so that it can cool down by the time it circulates back in
What’s it called/who should I look up to learn about this?
Its an amazon data center in Gilroy, been in the works for a long time but they recently put up the development signs so I think now that they ran the new water lines a like a year ago they are ready to break ground
They don’t even have enough water for the garlic anymore, and that’s the crop equivalent of a fucking lizard :(
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.
its also colder at night, because the desert doesnt retain heat much? in places like vegas its hot, because the asphalt and concrete absorbs heat.
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.
heat-resistant microchips
Wat
Yeah, man, Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds! He could support the development of something that breaks the fundamental rules of physics EASILY!
He can go develop me a liquid nitro cooling setup.
Use so many fans he can power a wind farm
Shove his servers up his bum
Honestly i’m fine with any of the above
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.
Computers use electricity to do math. The more electricity you have, the more math you can do. In order to do the math, the electricity is handled in a way that outputs heat. Unfortunately, the most reliable, cost effective and plentiful materials that allow electricity to do a lot of math also get heavily impacted by heat.
modern cpus has an energy density on par with nuclear power plant cores.
they need cooling, money cant break physics.
Remember that time that Microsoft sunk a data center in the ocean, proved this was cost effective, was reliable and could scale? And now it’s been five years and nothing happened? Yeah that was annoying.
Anyway their site of glowing press releases is still up for some reason
It worked well until there was a component failure, requiring a whole farm to be taken down to replace said failed components. This is why they dropped the project.
They didn’t think of that when designing this?
I’m sure they did, and they wouldn’t take the farm down until there was X% failure, but the amount of time and effort it took to perform those repairs made it unfeasible.
What do you think research is?
you don’t need to jump off a building to research gravity…
the specific issue that is claimed to have made the entire project unviable is easily spotted a mile away
How are you going to evaluate long term effects without practical experiments? They clearly have the money and its much easier and efficient to launch a real MVP than to design a complex set of simulations and tests.
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.
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.
Externalization of cost, the environment and community bears the cost instead of the corporation. Privatize the profits, externalize the costs.
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.
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.
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.
Demand, ain’t much of it in the desert. Also, easy to manipulate governments.
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.
Fewer hurricanes out there, and other natural disasters as well. I don’t know how tuscon is seismically, but otherwise it has a lot of lowere risks from nature, probably
I think evaporative cooling is more effective.
Right, that’s what they said. For a closed loop, because it’s less “effective”, you need a much larger system. It’s more expensive to build and requires a much larger footprint and corporations like Amazon would rather save a penny than do anything to reduce their harm.
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?
Evaporate chilling
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!
So they’ll just go build it in Chandler with all the others instead, I guess?
Well fine, guess I’ll have to make my obese fart videos the old fashioned way. Anyone seen my kimchi?
