An apparently local company is trying to open a so-called "AI datacentre" near where I live on the west coast of Scotland supposedly powered by renewables, but the quoted power consumption figures do NOT add up...

In reply to Dunkirk.

Well it's the "at all costs" part that is the crux, isn't it? Because they're not willing to pay "all costs" they're only willing to make their profit an externality of the government and of the people.

If, hypothetically, a gray water feed was available and all they had, then "at all cost" would mean, "welp, I guess to build our data center cooling system we also need to build our own sewage treatment plant." But obviously they wouldn't do that, so "at all cost" is false.

In reply to Aaron Axvig.

You're right; it's not a technical limitation. I helped build out a small data center. Part of the reason the company built it was because they had a very successful engine test facility, and had become experts at dealing with the high-capacity cooling systems required. It is an extremely complex science. Dealing with accumulated solids and possible corrosives is a big part of the job, but using gray water would make that part much harder. Even if it were available, data centers would avoid it at all costs.

In reply to thielges.

This is what happens when salaries in the private sector are so much higher than the ones in public service. Ill-intentioned people will gravitate to the private sector. Well-intentioned ones will gravitate to the public.  Bright, motivated people will have their choice of both, and many well-intentioned ones will opt to eat some income disparity in service of work that fits with their values.

But the farther the cost of living accelerates away from the stagnant wages that don't even keep up with inflation imposed by "austerity measures" and "small government conservatives" and the desire to "end the tax-and-spend mentality of liberals" etc. etc. etc., the harder it is for the bright, motivated, and well-intentioned to live with the anorexic income provided by choosing work that fits with their values, especially at the entry level. The rest of the story writes itself.

it's been a few years since i worked in platforms but sadly google is less bad (just a little bit so still not good) than the other providers since they ran the datacenters hotter than anyone else. we'd test across the vendor's operating range to get derating curves. if you (as a vendor) said your operating range topped out at 80C but performance fell off before google's target there'd be a talking to in your future.

In reply to Michael Gemar.

God forbid they learn about heatsinks and fans instead of dumping their (probably) biocide-laden cancer water into the air.

In reply to thielges.

The number and prevalence of people in every field who uncritically believe the claims of a company's PR or sales group always astounds me.

In reply to jwz.

But then they'd have to actually pay for their temples.  That would deflate their bubble and cause their idiot god never to be born.  Then it would not be able to solve climate change. That Would Not Do.

I mean, I learnt today that a lot of these temples are being funded by debt secured on the GPUs.  Yes, really: debt secured on things which (a) will definitely be worthless in a decade or less and (b) will be worthless in months if (when) the bubble deflates.

This thing makes the subprime catastrophe look like very small beer.  Somewhere, somebody is working out how to short humanity.

In reply to Kyzer.

Toronto cools its entire downtown without depleting Lake Ontario. It's been doing that for 20+ years. Why isn't this an option here?

Note that (from the Wikipedia page you linked 'These are used to transfer heat between the portable water and a closed chilled water loop'.  So this is a primary/secondary coolant system, so the primary coolant stays clean.

But yes, this is very far from a new idea.  Steamships from sometime in the mid 19th century used condensers to cool the exhaust steam, with seawater as the secondary.  Before that they often used condensers which sprayed seawater directly into the exhaust steam which meant they were, in effect, boiling seawater to make the steam with resulting crap boiler & water pipe lifetimes.  Cornish beam engines used the water they pumped out of the mine the same way.

Nuclear power stations have a bad time in tsunamis because they do the same trick: they're using lots of seawater as a secondary coolant (often a tertiary I think).

To make this work you need

• to be very close to a large body of water which is always cooler than your primary side;
• if your primary side is fairly low temperature you also need that large body of water to either be reliably much cooler than it (Lake Ontario has a convenient thermocline and is indeed reliably very cold at depth) or it has to be absolutely enormous and you have to move a lot of it through the secondary system, which means very big pipes and very large pumps.

Yes, DCs could and should be on coastlines and do this.  Yes there's then a coastlines-are-1D/country-is-2D problem that presumably would mean suitable-coastline-adjacent sites become hugely expensive.

This whole thing reminds me of the 'why can't we just cool the tube?' question people ask in the summer in London.  TFL have literally run competitions with significant prizes for solutions to this problem.  Nobody won the prizes.  The obvious answer of using superfluid liquid helium for its wonderful thermal conductivity seems to be considered impractical.

Cooling things that pump out lots of power is a problem that is no-messing-about hard.

Well, we should be thankful that at least the more-temples-for-the-idiot-AI people aren't planning on building their temples in space, where the cooling problems make those on Earth seem trivial ... taps headset ... oh, I see.  And these people are tech geniuses, you say?  Which stock should I be shorting?  All of them, I see, I see.

In reply to tfb.

I'm no expert on HVAC but my general gist is that water politics are a real thing, people get really antsy when you start fucking with main resource they need to survive. There must be some solution for cooling machines that doesn't involve depleting the humans' water reserves, and then being bashful about having done that.

Toronto cools its entire downtown without depleting Lake Ontario. It's been doing that for 20+ years. Why isn't this an option here?

In reply to Aaron Axvig.

Ok but hear me out, if some multinational predator is ready to kick down a ~billon dollars to build their Torment Nexus Warehouse maybe just maybe we could make them pay for those pipes too.

In reply to thielges.

*Tosses a golden apple with "trash cans" carved into it into the chat*

In reply to jwq.

I remember being thoroughly disappointed by Thunderdome when I saw it as a kid in the theater. Re-watched it a few months back... it's really pretty good. Certainly not as good as Road Warrior or Fury Road, but it holds up a lot better than some of the nostalgia re-watches I've done lately (hey, did you know that in addition to being a brilliant musician and songwriter, Prince was a complete piece of shit? Watch the "Purple Rain" movie and you'll see exactly how!)

In reply to Kyzer.

I don't think cleaning the water is the limitation.  Are there big reservoirs or pipe-flows of grey-water waiting around to be used?

No.

In reply to Kyzer.

"... your local government -- are a bit thick, not all that well paid, are overly trusting, don't push back, and just want to go home at the end of the day"

Same situation here in the USA.  We hire contractors who are skilled at exploiting the weakness of bureaucrats.  An example is Cubic who deployed and operates SF's stored value transit payment system.  One would think that after building systems for other transit agencies like TfL that this would be a straightforward, efficient deployment of existing working tech.  But no, it was very expensive, as if we had to pay the whole R&D cycle all over again.  And of course it did not work and San Francisco Bay transit agencies had to pay for change orders to fix the bugs.  We are currently in the throes of version 2.0 that somehow is working even worse than the initial rollout.

I've been an observer of how these contractors interact with our government and can conclude that those signing the contracts on the government side are simply just naive about how to make this process work in the public's favor, allowing the contractors to just steamroll them over a period of years.  This is not an easy problem to fix, but there seems to be no will to get better.

In reply to Glaurung.

At least that means they aren't avoiding Flesh Gordon from 1974.

In reply to John White.

No, it isn't like saying that at all. Also, First Blood is regarded now as the strongest of that trilogy, unlike Mad Max, so it's not a great match for comparison.

In reply to Monkey Mind.

People: Why don't you put your datacenter in the ocean?

AI Cultists: Impossible. Although that seems to solve the cooling problems, it's way too hard for reasons you wouldn't understand.

Also AI Cultists: We're putting millions of datacenters  _IN SPACE!!!_

In reply to #?.info.

Why would they do that though, when they can get subsidies and get people pay to drain thier own resources?

In reply to #?.info.

Then next month you charge them 100x, then 1000x, etc. Eventually they think, "Maybe we should do something about this gigantic water bill?". Hopefully before they've used up all the water. Even if they use up all the water eventually anyway, at least the town gets $10 billion instead of $10 million.

In reply to Western Infidels.

Are they straight-up taking bribes

Why is that even a question?  Of course they are.

In reply to Jon PENNYCOOK.

That's good so long as the humans live suitably close at hand and want to be heated all the time.

There's not much I want less than to encourage techbros to build more temples for their idiot god, but if they're going to do that then dissipating low-temperature waste heat is a problem which thermodynamics says has no really good solution.

Of course the AI-god cultists don't really believe in thermodynamics so ... oh, I forgot: they are in fact just idiots.

How did we get to be ruled by people who are so stupid?  I really don't understand.

In reply to Kyzer.

You want the water to be very very clean because you really do not want deposits of whatever accumulating in the cooling system.

In reply to tfb.

Ideally, if they must heat water to render humans jobless, maybe they could heat houses, public buildings, and offices.

In reply to jwq.

That's like saying that Rambo: First Blood doesn't have enough explosions for today's movie-watching audience.

In reply to MattyJ.

From the wiki: "A guitar pedal is chained to Coma's waist. It appears charred beyond recognition, though the shape and design resembles a generic BOSS four-knob pedal."

It is a BOSS Metal Zone pedal, which has survived the apocalypse. There is no other possibility.

In reply to Chancerubbage.

"I hated the 1980 Flash Gordon film because of the music, therefore I have avoided all other Flash Gordon adaptations ever since" is... a stance one can take.   

In reply to Adam Katz.

Why do they even let them have potable water? Sell them graywater if you must sell them anything at all. Potable water is for humans, not clankers.

In reply to Western Infidels.

To give an example from where I live, it can sometimes be because the developer's representatives are the brightest, most weaselly, and highest paid people possible, who aim to pay nothing and get everything, and the people legally responsible for representing society's interests -- your local government -- are a bit thick, not all that well paid, are overly trusting, don't push back, and just want to go home at the end of the day.

They don't have to be corrupt for evil companies to get their way, they just have to be incompetent.

In this particular case, the council didn't estimate enough school places for a new housing development, then the developer asked permission to build and sell even more houses, and further underestimated how many school places would be needed. The council let them do it, didn't question their number, and the developer probably knew it was too low but said nothing because that meant massively more profit for them. Meanwhile, the council fought off members of the public who were more competent than them and were raising the alarm.

Regardless of considerable uncertainty of estimating pupil need 20 years ahead, before detailed consents had been given and the housing mix known, the Council allowed BAE to cap its contributions in both agreements, leaving all of the risk with the Council.

It is difficult to see how both of these agreements, involving potentially millions of pounds of investment in primary and secondary education, could have been handled in a more incompetent manner. With regard to the 2018 Agreement in particular, there was overwhelming evidence from Council documents that pupil demand had been seriously underestimated before entering into that agreement.

In addition, there were numerous legitimate concerns expressed by the Community Council, parent representatives, Councillors and others which were brushed aside, and not subjected to even cursory examination.

In reply to Adam Katz.

I have a feeling the same groups that are buying RAM for $10-15/gig would not balk at paying 10x the going rate for "all of the local water supply", so it wouldn't deter them, and the local community might end up with plenty of cash but they'd have no drinking water.