This will help fighting the global colding we’ve had going on… wait, something’s off. Am I reading the charts upside down again?
It’s the secret government weather weapon they were talking about! It is real!
Once again I am shocked that you always have these big ass heat exchangers on these data centers but no talk of even trying to use some of the waste heat to offset the power use.
Typical waste in the USA. I believe Sweden or Finland pump the heat out for residential use.
I don’t think the main problem of Phoenix is the lack of heating
They could boil seawater, condense the steam into drinking water
its more expensive since you will need to deal with corrosion and heat degrading the equipment overtime.
They are wasteful on purpose. they could have closed circuit cooling systems where they condense the water from the vapor and reuse it. But they are a giant middle finger to all of us.
Water is cheaper to waste than electricity unfortunately.
Pretty sure most modern data centers are using closed loop cooling or refrigeration. Not evaporative cooling.
You can’t condense the water either that would defeat the point of evaporating it in the first place. Closed loop liquid cooling does not involve boiling or evaporation. You are just pumping a liquid around a circuit. It’s not just water either it’s more like a car antifreeze.
Got any info to back that up? Here’s a screenshot from page 39 of the US Data Center Energy Usage Report, which shows the use of closed loop systems (which they call dry cooling) as one of the smallest percentages of cooling types used. Pretty sure you’ve got it completely backwards on the types of cooling used, and I know for a fact the massive Amazon data center out in Oregon uses evaporative, because you can’t drink the water there as a result.
Why would they call closed loop liquid cooling “dry cooling”? Unless they explicitly said that then I don’t believe you to be honest.
Evaporative cooling wouldn’t make the water undrinkable unless something has gone very wrong. So I don’t think what you are saying about Oregan is true either.
This is also only representative of the USA, not worldwide. I get that much of the world doesn’t have many datacenters compared to the USA, but you at least have to include China and the EU.
The laws of thermodynamics? Can’t create or destroy energy and overall entropy increases over time. A closed loop (or any cooling system) just moves heat away from the hot thing. So yes, they can be used as much as any other cooling system but it won’t stop the issue of “generating lots of heat”. That heat still needs to go somewhere. Dumping it into the atmosphere might be the best option if there’s nothing in the area that needs heat. Should probably build them next to steel plants or something like that. Then a closed loop would be better.
I never said it fixed the issue of generating heat. Heat isn’t really a major problem as far as I am concerned. I thought we were talking about water use.
Fair enough, I thought we were talking about the heat lol.
? OP was claiming that the majority of data centers use closed loop/refrigeration systems and I was pointing out that US data shows the vast majority use evaporative cooling. They posted a few comments pushing that idea which is why I refuted that. I’m not sure what the point you’re trying to make is in regards to those two statements. I’m not disputing the accuracy of what you’re saying, just unsure of where you’re going with it.
Thought your request to back it up was in response to the parent comment saying that condensing the water defeats the purpose rather than the first paragraph.
Just a talking point in an investors report. The more I read on these centers the more I am convinced they are not built to work.
The guy you are replying to doesn’t actually know jack about data centers. Plenty do use closed loop cooling which doesn’t involve evaporating water. It’s only a minority that use evaporative cooling. Power stations are more likely to use evaporative cooling (hence big towers with steam clouds) than datacenters are. They also use far more cooling water than datacenters do. Both pale in comparison to agriculture and other uses.
Some people making datacenter looks into way to recycle the extra heat, some uses it to heat local area (willingly). But all of this costs more than just, dumping it out, I guess.
Phoenix. What are you going to do with it in Phoenix? 24/7 saunas?
Not only that… but Lake Tahoe is being abandoned by their power company to power data centers because its more profitable.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/
How is that even allowed
Free market economy. You could technically do similar with nordpool. Set up a ridiculous power consumer and watch everyone’s prices go up.
I don’t know, but it sets a dangerous precedent.
It doesn’t set a precedent at all. It’s always been like this.
Now just more people are being effected by it and in places that people actually give a fuck about. So it’s news now.
Mind throwing out a source? Having some trouble searching for other places that have experienced this kinda thing, with how fucked search has gotten. All I can find are articles about company towns, which don’t feel like what you’re referring to.
Its a travesty, but in that case a little more strange. The blame is not just on the power company but also the local government, the company was bought in 2009 and told the community it would be winding down providing power in the area. The local government got a few extensions but now they have “better” customers they are not going to give them any more. So for many years the area knew it had this issue to deal with but like a lot of americans just sat on their asses and said nothing could be done.
As to why this is allowed, simple, it is a power company existing in a system where profit is the sole factor in anything.
2009 was 17 years ago, they had so much time
I think part of the issue is they did not really try, it looks like they just assumed things would stay the same. The other part is how would they get another provider? I assume they could get one but for how much more?
That’s fucking WILD
Insanity.
Thank you for linking.
(Noun.) (Noun.) ?
You don’t know what a noun is do you?
space, noun, outside earth’s atmosphere
I thought this was the meaning of space in space billionaires? Billionaires who pour a lot of money into going to space?
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/space_1?q=space
I do not understand how people still live there.
A Karren has their own special way to do this no matter what.
Well they don’t believe in global warming but perhaps they’ll believe in local warming.
No karen really lives laughs and loves. They brood frown and hate.
“Data centers are inherently an important part of our society, and they’re going to become even more necessary going forward,”
God, fuck this shit
Right?
Like, says who and on what historical basis? People said similar shit about crypto and we all know how that turned out.
You literally are using a data center or several to post this. How do you think the internet works?
Not the same type of data centre.
The majority of datacenters and datacenter power consumption are not for AI. Before AI no one cared about datacenters. Still no one cares about datacenters that already existed and make up the majority of datacenters. I don’t understand it. Is this just manufactured outrage?
C’mon bro put 2 and 2 together, you can do it
What do you want me to put together? Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean instead of beating around the bush?
Please don’t be obtuse on purpose. It’s not helpful to anyone
How is this being obtuse?
So running a community forum on a decade old laptop, or someone using a hand-me-down phone to watch videos are equal to openAI’s stargate hyperscaler?
We don’t classify a laptop a data centre just because it was repurposed as a web server, and furthermore, devices are so powerful today that you could probably do the same on a smart watch.
Either you don’t know what a data centre is, or are intentionally skewing the definition of “data centre” to fit your snarky reply.
YouTube requires enormous amounts of data center hardware. Do you have any idea how much video data they injest, transcode, and distribute in even just an hour or a minute? It’s not very economical to run actually and they had major problems even breaking even.
Most large Lemmy instances run on cloud services nowadays. So they rely on a datacenter somewhere. I am well aware you can self-host - I have done so for multiple things including AI models and tools - but that’s a minority of Lemmy users. Most are using public instances which are hosted on servers in the cloud. In fact if you read the deployment guide for Lemmy it is meant to be deployed using cloud native technology.
You also don’t need a whole Stargate to host one users AI usage. You don’t even need a whole server. Typically AI servers process requests from multiple users simultaneously. The actual marginal cost of each user is relatively small, hence why people can and do run local AI models.
Disingenuous
You literally are using a data center or several to post this. How do you think the internet works?
It’s funny how the last decade or so we were always told to save water and ditch the car, you know, be as environmentally friendly as possible only for big companies to come along and basically do the opposite; again and again.
The world is going to shit and everyone knows it, but money talks I guess… I can’t fucking take it anymore.
These people that make these decisions have names and addresses.
Every state has a website like this one: https://sos.oregon.gov/business/Pages/find.aspx
And for the low low price of free, you will know their business address, their mailing address, and the personal address of the most important people in any company you look up.
I do not support doxxing of residents and civilians, but lets be real here. Wealthy corps and wealthy people are in charge. People.
Data centers have tons of precious metals like copper and such
Just sayin
And they have tons of RAM and SSDs.
Those aren’t the same people. More often than not, the people who fuck the environment the most, tend to finance parties that want to end any environmental protection.
It’s your country’s fault for voting for the political party that doesn’t believe in science.
Don’t drag Germany into this…
Actually, do whatever to Germany I don’t really care
Germany seems fine on some level, at least you don’t have a wannabe dictator. What concerns me is that the cold war border is still very visible on political maps.
Worse. The Neo Nazis are winning in the Commie heartland.
The democrats love ai too
Atleast they believe in climate change
The tech oligarchs sided with the magats because the Democrats said they were going to treat AI like the Manhattan project, for safety. One of the biggest reasons the US election cycle went the way it did was because the Democrats said they weren’t going to allow this.
In America both parties are shit and they have some people that aspire to some kinds of genocide fascist that I don’t support. In my country(Poland) there are more parties, but each one have at least one politician that aspire to genocide.
Even when two sides are bad, one is always worse than the other
The unceasing demonic entities do not have a soul. It is folly to attribute human emotions such as the survival of the human race to a destruction wraith as if it had any other drive than the gluttonous desperate need for growth we have all assigned and written contracts with them, while pretending we have no individual choice. There are so many alternate governments beside rampant hypercapitalist greed slaughter mode that could give humans some power over the immortal global hatemachines that are burying our race as a game. But what do I know, it is normalized by usa to let engines of hell have lifeblood lawyers lobby and extract any value from all corners of society because of “growth”. I think every human knows the difference in their bones, between prosperity and growth. Yet some humans even has as their jobs to try to trick in any way possible the targets they only want prosperity. When they know its growth, its goal is to grow and consume us entirely. Then when we have been eradicated, I guess they will just wither away not even caring who won any more. It’s disgusting to think about. The lobbying lawyer servants that makes sure they are unstoppable by their masters exponential obliteration march. I think it is vile that you allow these hungering spectres prey on the world under the guise of prosperity. Hypercapitalism is an extremist and occult form of government. You don’t even seem to react to the political jesters dance. Entranced by their games? By the allure of their lies? Bleh. It is easy to mistake prosperity for growth. I understand. But now you know. One is poison.
Who the fuck builds a data center in Phoenix?! Was the surface of the sun not available?
They don’t give a fuck about us. Phoenix likely gave tax breaks, energy deals etc
Seems hard to believe that those would outweigh the like 30 degree average temperature difference of building it some place like Glasgow Montana.
The cooling water evaporates real nice in the desert tho
I didn’t think about evaporative cooling for some reason, how much water will that use?
At some point, people need to find ways to cancel these things.
They raised the surrounding temperature in fucking Phoenix Arizona? A place already so hot that it can kill you within hours. we’re so fucked.
Good thing climate change isn’t real or we’d be in BIG trouble!
Yeah… that would be bad…
No one in Phoenix will notice. If you’ve stuck around in Phoenix this long you’ve managed to stop caring about temperatures not fit for human life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE
Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?
The family exits the car
Bobby: Oh my God! It’s like standing on the sun!
Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance!
EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)
But you will notice the lack of water…
Eventually. Maybe sooner than we think.
Phoenix has been insisting there’s 100+ years of water under the mountains, etc. for decades. But every time there’s been any sort of effort to verify, it gets killed either by the government or courts on various ways.
Phoenix also loves to concrete over absolutely every open area, removing natural heat sinks into the ground. It’s one of the big reasons the Phoenix area is as hot as it is and maintains that heat overnight instead of actually cooling a bit like other cities in the Sonoran Desert region.
Tucson here: I thought I’d like to move to Phoenix for the big city convinces. After staying overnight at a friend’s house, I can solidly say that the difference in the summer is insane. It’s a whole new level of heat. It’s doable, but shit, it’s not a joke if you’re unprepared.
The heat island effect is not an exaggeration. The lows in Phoenix in the summer are higher than the highs in even warm climate cities.
Yeah Tucson has a lot of blank spaces spread throughout the city when you actually get down to the street level. Lots of open areas for the heat to be absorbed by the earth rather than just getting trapped in concrete and asphalt everywhere.
It’s kinda hilarious that poverty and bad business sense made those empty spaces and it works out as a net positive.
Nothing better than a concrete/asphalt desert in the middle of the summer with zero shade.
I really don’t get that. Every desert I’ve lived in, as soon as the sun went down the temperature dropped like ten, maybe twenty frankfurters. Phoenix just stays hot and that definitely seems engineered
Yeah that’s what deserts do.
But Phoenix isn’t a desert anymore, it’s a big concrete pad that works just like any rock you put into a hot space… it absorbs heat through the day then radiates it back out once the sun is down. They replaced the desert but didn’t leave holes for it to still work the same.
Maybe. I assume they’ve all evolved into lizard-people by now.
Already a lack of thar.
I stay here because I have family here. I hate the weather with a passion. Let’s not make it even worse.
The republicans are also gutting our national parks and selling them off.
Big cuts and sweeping changes have destabilized the National Park Service and its core missions.
National parks facing ‘nightmare’ under Trump, warns ex-director of service
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
This is such an affront to the nation, its history, and its people, it is shocking that there isn’t more outrage about this. But then again there’s not nearly enough outrage to go around to cover all the constant bullshit.
The republic is being DDOSed with bullshit. It’s a fucking smash and grab and the looters are just running wild at the moment, before our eyes.
I’ll never forgive NPS leadership, the pace at which they moved to follow illegal orders was astounding. HR moved faster than ever before to hire people when they are the ones that know best how to slow things down.
Not a single person in a position of power pushed back in anyway way. I’m not even talking about defying orders here. They didn’t even use existing policy to slow things down. There are mechanisms and choices that could have been made, but they didn’t do it.
Not a single person in a position of power
I agree with you, but I think it’s important to point out that the people in power from his first term and now, are trump sychophants or direct placements by republicans. They didn’t do anything because they didn’t want to.
Not true, he appointed the Secretary (who also appoints the Director) yes but truthfully they do basically none of the work. The non-political civilian service employees do the work. Think regional directors (not politically appointed), heads of regional HR, and park superintendents.
These people had the ability to slow things down, and they chose not to. At best a few people resigned and interim leadership stepped in to carry out orders. These interim leaders were already NPS employees various Chiefs and Deputies of different branches (regional and parks).
These are people that have been in the park service 20+ years. Hell I saw a few of them break down and cry, and yet they kept the agendas rolling.
Policy alone lets you take 3 sick days in a row with no doctors note. At least do that much to slow it down
I hope whoever is in office next is absolutely cutthroat about demagafication and goes after every company and individual profiting off of this with the full fury of RICO and anti-trust laws to reclaim America’s national parks.
Clearly those data centers aren’t using enough fire. We should donate more fire to them.
