I was just running the audio video in the discussion hall, but cooling data centers was a common topic when I worked for Giant Tech Firm ~20 years ago. The engineers always said the easiest way to do it was just make the room bigger, but actually doing that was never going to fly with upper management. Seeing “unused” space was simply untenable.
Another idea I heard was building the things fairly high up on the windward slopes of mountain ranges like the Cascades or Sierra Nevada. Partially underground, with unpowered ventilation systems that use the constant upwelling wind.
But, no. We have to pack it all tight and build them in places that aren’t naturally cold.
If you’re building it somewhere with cheap land (and why wouldn’t you?), it seems like “just make the room bigger” would usually be the cheapest option.
Modern data centres, especially AI systems have really high density. It isn’t just a desire for less real estate. Although that helps. AI systems are operating as a parallel computer and latency matters. In addition to simple speed of light issues, every time you step to the next level of interconnect bandwidth slows down. You really want high density.
Fluid cooled systems have always been around. CDC, Cray, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But air was always cheaper, and upstart supercomputer companies like Thinking Machines made a point of air cooling being cheaper. Back then 10s of kilowatts was a lot, and say 5 kilowatts per rack the sort of ballpark.
Now power density is vastly higher, and getting the heat out exceeds anything air can reasonably manage.
But that water is in a closed loop, and isn’t a consumable.
When you are trying to move heat about you are going to find it impossible to ignore the fabulous utility present in the latent heat of evaporation of water. Water takes a lot of energy to evaporate and that is energy you suck out of your data centre. Depending upon how warm you are happy to run your systems you might manage with only that.
If you need to run things colder, heat pumps come in, but even here, the colder they see the ejection end, the higher their coefficient of performance. And that directly affects the energy needed to run the data centre. You can see a doubling of CoP adding a water cooling tower. That might mean a 10-15% drop in your data centre’s electricity use. If you are already power limited, this is impossible to ignore.
« We have also launched a new AI datacenter design that uses a closed-loop system. By constantly recirculating a cooling liquid, we can dramatically cut our water usage. In this next-generation design, already deployed in locations such as Wisconsin and Georgia, potable water is no longer needed for cooling, reducing pressure on local freshwater systems. »
Bolding mine. They acknowledge using potable water but only the amount it takes to initially fill the closed system.
The city in our county, Urbana Ohio, is considering a proposal to build a data center. It will have a closed-loop cooling system. Lots of people are against it, for reasons that are unclear to me.
There’s a FB page dedicated to opposing it. I asked why the data center would be bad for the community. Here’s the response I got:
I don’t see any sort of regulation getting through in the next two years. Thus the rush to get centers built by the cheapest methods possible before that time runs out. It would be highly unusual to not grandfather in existing infrastructure when the regulations finally go through.
A lot of what people fear about data centers is woo. But there are real problems when they try to take up space in suburbs. Primarily noise and electrical grid related. They take up huge amounts of space, and for some reason these companies always want to put them in the suburbs instead of in rural communities. Then they demand enormous tax benefits, saying they are going to add thousands of jobs. But the jobs are only there while the place is being built. Once it’s up and running, the number of employees is just not enough to balance the tax breaks.
They just don’t give anything back to the local community, and they are a drain on infrastructure which the community must pay to maintain. Because tax breaks for business.
Then there are the gas turbines a few of them use to generate power, which is a whole other nightmare. And that’s where the grain of truth from the woo complaints begins.
I vaguely recall when I was in university, an Urban Planning major mentioned that it was a city in Texas, Houston I think, that had no zoning laws, yet in a way everything worked out not much different than cities with zoning.
The problem with lossless cooling is that without the boost from evaporation, the system would need much bigger radiators to blow air through (like a car); unless they sat on a large cool body of water (hence, oceans, big rivers). The problem there becomes what a significant boost in heat does to the ecosystem, when the local aquatic life is adapted to a certain temperature range. Plus, on a river system, you are now at the mercy of that river’s dependability. This applies whether it’ a power plant of a large heat-generating computing facility.
That’s because while Houston doesn’t have the use-based restrictions in its zoning code that you find nearly everywhere else (single-family residential, retail, light industrial, office, etc.) it still has all the other trappings of zoning that affect development. Those would be things like lot area coverage maximums, parking minimums, lot line setbacks, floor area ratio maximums, stormwater retention areas, buffer/screening zones, impervious surface maximums, minimum dwelling unit sizes, and all that stuff. So they still have 80% or more of the typical zoning code as anywhere else.
I’m sure someone has thought of this, but can the heat be repurposed to do useful work? Could you put a data center next to a large building and pipe the heat over there for winter heating or hot water use?
Speaking to the general impact of Data Centers, a close family friend is an Assistant Attorney General in Texas working specifically for the Environmental Protection Division, and her rants about blatant abuse of the already lax provisions is a thing of fury and terror, especially with a few drinks in her.
So not only are the existing laws lax in the extreme, but they’re flagrantly ignored. One of her common complaints is that some of the laws are toothless because they fines for violating the law are so small that it’s easier for some to just pay the fines every period while pulling in maximum profits at a terrifying cost to the local environment and communities.
She also commented that the currently planned and funded data centers already on paper would require several new nuclear power plants for sufficient power generation within 2 years. So the water loss for many agricultural and ranching communities is an immediate and community ending concern (major political rant omitted), but even if water were as endless as some believe it to be, there is just no way for Texas to generate the power for all these data centers. Which can lead to the datacenters running illegal power generators on site:
Which further raises the need for cooling, and more unapproved and unrecoverable water loss, as well as countless other risks from the unregulated byproducts as a rage-inducing +1.
There is some water used in data centers, but when you see mind bogglingly high numbers, it tends to be because the people doing the math included non potable water used (but not used up) in the generation of electricity.
Do you mean health hazards caused by noise (like the idea that the sound will batter your cells and give you cancer)? I think that’s utter woo.
Or if you mean just that they make some noise that people can hear? Maybe that’s true, but it’s not going to be any more disruptive than like, city sounds in an urban apartment, or living next to any industrial plant.
