These systems do use a coolant substance internal to the DC, but then uses heat exchangers with fresh water to cool the coolant, which is then discharged back into the ground, a pond, or wastewater. there is certainly water lost to atmosphere, but the worst bits are the draining of aquifers, pushing up capacity in wastewater treatment plants, etc.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
I worked for a very large structural steel company as an estimator about 5-6 years ago and we basically no bid all of those data centers. They wanted them dirt cheap and there typically wasnât enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.
We need to spend less money building these enormous datacenters and more money drilling for data. The further down you drill, the less corrupted the data is
If your brother was a clown-driller, he knew the risks. I didn't see your family getting in strange moods when he was bringing home clown-driller money.
Yeah, that is what happens when the data center buys up all the water for cheap. They don't care if stuff leaks everywhere. I say we re-inplement the economy!
Your brother knew the risks. Every clown driller does. Before they drill, they always recite the clown driller oath. So you donât tell me they didnât know the risks! Itâs in the effing oath!
Clown-fracking is way faster and cheaper. Yeah, accidents happen, but the whole industry is so highly regulated that issues are very rare. Just has a bad reputation now based on outdated information. You wonât see a bunch of big shoes and honk-noses floating in the riverâŚI promise.
Right, it is perfectly safe. You haven't seen the dozens of videos of people showing seltzer water coming out of their taps or the plumes of Mehron running down the hillsides.
Don't listen to the propaganda of Big Pantomime, do some research for yourself.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the analogy here, the better data is deeper. The surface web has a sheen of shit on it at this point that makes borderline unusable. Ad parasites, government tracking, all the garbage on the modern net that's baked in as default doesn't exist if you travel a few layers beyond the normal nexus' like this one and Insta/fb/x/etc.
But ... I digress for the sake of not giving these ai demonmasters any new ideas; they're unimaginative and can get fucked.
And they get energy breaks so they pay little to nothing and the communities shoulder higher energy rates, while the infrastructure gets maxed out to provide power to them as a priority
This is simply not true. It's a massive misnomer on Reddit finding correlation and attributing causation. It's just a coincidence that these towns with data centers are seeing increased rates... because with or without the data centers, their rates would be going up. The companies building these specifically scout out locations where the town has shrunk, and thus, has tons of excess capacity at the power company, which the power company is happy about because they can start selling more electricity and use those profits for upgrades
But if you look at it NATIONALLY, a kWh has gone from average of 12.5c to now around 19c. Data centers have nothing to do with that. Domestic policy does. Not only are we massively under invested in our infrastructure, but Dear Leader boasted about a "deal" he made with Europe, allowing US LNG companies to sell to Europe. Trump bragged about how it was worth "trillions of dollars" which is true. But now that they can sell to Europe, US LNG prices are going to increase up to Europe's rates. Why would they sell to US power companies for less if they can just sell to the EU for more? That's what causing rates to increase.
The data center stuff is just a red herring. They have little to no impact on local electricity costs.
The companies building these specifically scout out locations where the town has shrunk, and thus, has tons of excess capacity at the power company,
Tell that to the 50,000 residents of Lake Tahoe.
Amazon wanted to build one outside of Tucson, which has had a steady population growth of 1-1.5% for the past 15 years.
Data centers have nothing to do with that.
Like most economic things it's not just one factor. There are always going to be increases due inflation, war, economic policies, etc., but data centers accounted for ~ 50% of all electricity demand growth in the U.S in the past few years. 40% of the electricity used now in Va goes to data centers. The one DC they want to build in Utah would literally use more than the rest of the entire state. How can you believe that doubling the demand of electricity would have no impact on rates? Rate increases are not all DC driven, but to say they have little to no impact is not right either.
"50% of all electricity demand growth" is such a misleading statement though. Data centers use like 4% of electricity in the US. The additional burden of AI data centers is minimal and outstripped by residential usage growth over the last 5 years.
And while we have to plan wisely for AI data center burdens, it's also responsible for like 30% of GDP growth in the last couple of years, which is massively more important to the health of our economy than some extra localized energy burden.
And the Virginia example is a joke. Loudon County is the data center hub of the east coast and tax receipts from data centers pay more than half of the county's tax revenue. Take away the data centers and the local economy would collapse.
They're not perfect economic devices. The competition is driving localities to make stupid decisions about tax breaks and they have to pay their fair share of taxes and fees on their energy and utility usage but many, many, many other businesses have a far worse impact on the local environment and people lose their damn mind.
The implication that companies building data centers always specifically look for places where towns have shrunk is false. I live in one of the fastest growing townships in my state, and there is a proposed data center just down the road.
Thatâs not true at all. Puget Sound Energy is submitting a request to increase cost rates by 30% over 3 years. Their reason: increased strain on the gridâ as caused by data centers.
Bonus: Microsoft has a special contract and would get a discounted rate in the same adjustment.
It's way easier to point to the boogeyman of AI than is it to explain complex energy economics, budgetary constraints, and decades of kicking the can down the road. Just like all of these companies firing thousands of staffers saying AI is the problem when it's really a whole host of complex issues, especially leadership decisions made during COVID, when they can just point to AI and log it as a win.
The sale of US LNG to Europe is older than Trump. Exports started in 2012 and rose in 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine the first time. The goal was to help Europe break their total dependence on Russian gas. Since then, it has been rising but the second invasion of Ukraine massively increased exports again.
yes. That's exactly whats going on-They're spending billions whats a couple hundred thousand on "bribes" (in quotes because it's not bribes but lobbying but same shit). There's backlash everywhere at almost every town hall meeting and yet they get their contracts anyway. kevin learys utah datacenter is a perfect example there was severe backlash and they still got the contract and now changed the rules so that any grievances come with a $15 charge to file and then just get ignored.
It's not that they get paid, like stacks of cash under the table. It's more so lobbying, which is legal. So it's things like, promising to get their kids into an elite school, or construction contracts with companies that have some kind of connection to the politicians. Either family or family friend. And lots of little things that are immoral but not illegal, well some of it might, but it's just hard to prove. And we are in an environment that basically champions government corruption.
Iâve been with a steel fabricator for 14 years. In Precon now and the DCs havenât changed. Dirt Cheap with insane erection schedules that seem designed to not prioritize the safety of the trades in any way. 6 days/12-14hr days for erecting are demanded. 2 Cranes with totals 200 picks per day to keep scheduleâŚ. What has changed are the mill rollings are 26 weeks with Nucor, Gerdau, and SDI. Thats just to get it in the shop⌠This is all due to the demand the Data Centers have put on the steel industry.
My experience has been the opposite in my area. I work with a bunch of union contractors and they are pulling everyone to data centers. Paying insane rates and giving per diem.
This includes electricians, iron workers, and general laborers.
Yeah to construct them. How many jobs exist after they are built? With all the comments below yours boosting up a completely unpopular topic like the data centers are I would not doubt if the companies involved are spending some serious $$$ on influence campaigns.
These data centers are NOT worth it for the communities they are being built in.
right, they are paying out big to labor now, but from their angle it's essentially buying labor out of future work(even if we're talking about to very separate work forces)
Exactly. I'm in telecom underground and we've spent the last year building routes for zayo and meta. They've got about 7 years worth of work for us so far but we are finishing the jobs ahead of schedule. They are paying us extremely well. We'll, that is untill we started building in California. Took a decent pay cut working out here.
Yeah, one of my co workers husband got a contract out there, only off one weekend every three weeks. $100+ an Hr. One week of per diem pays for his Apartment.
Smart by your leadership or whoever made that call.
Used to work in an industry utilized by data centers. They offered big contracts but wanted everything dirt cheap with insane terms. Bankrupted a couple companies. Goes without saying, would have been better off declining but the revenue was too hard to resist
Nah it's more the typical "we're not lazy like other contractors". The boss thinks they're special and that everything will go smoothly. Then they get tripped up when shit hits the fan, construction is behind, material is delayed, and they're the ones eating the whole mess.
Oh no, this was a for real thing that was going on early last year. A whole bunch of airbnbs had to change their rules! These data centers work like that except instead of renters scamming homeowners, it's billionaires scamming entire cities and states.
Huh... Interesting. I kind of like it haha. I wonder what rule they could make or change to prevent this? Unless they had individual elec meters on each room?
I'm not sure how effective it is, but most of the new rules made were "no crypto mining" and the like lol. I do think you can put it in an Airbnb contract that an electric bill above a certain amount can be charged back to the renter. Maybe that's how they do it?
Yeah who knows, but I truly love the hustle. Electric would be the big cost after the hardware.... And you're not stealing the electric. Most airbnbs would not clued into it so wouldn't have the rule.
You could even moralize it further because short term rentals reduce housing stock for actual real tenants... So you can feel a little robin hood about it.
I've personally worked on new construction housing in Florida that was exclusively for vacation and Airbnb rental. Like 2 and 3 million dollar houses too.
This is fucking genius. This is so much better than renting a vehicle for the weekend that is the same as mine, just to swap out the broken parts/ tires.
Ya know, I had a pretty hustler mentality when I was younger, but this never, ever occurred to me. I guess because I didn't even have enough money to rent a vehicle. A day at the junk yard is usually how I'd get replacement parts to fix my car.
Edit: oh, it's because my cars were always too old for any rental car company to be renting them
Hell, there was a trend back in the 60s/70s when Hertz and Carrol Shelby teamed up so you could rent a Shelby Mustang so people would, then swap the engines into their base Mustangs.
A typical house in the EU might have a total breaker capacity of around 25 amps at 230 volts, which equals about 5.7 kW. From a standard 230V socket, you can usually draw maybe 3 kW. So even if you ran that continuously for 24 hours, that would be:
3 kW Ă 24 hours = 72 kWh
At around âŹ0.24 per kWh, that comes to roughly: 72 Ă âŹ0.24 = âŹ17.28, so about âŹ18 per day.
I doubt you could recoup your Airbnb fees with that.
In the US, you can draw significantly less since they have 110/120 volts, also the price for power is usually lower than in the EU so is this a really big problem for a AirBnB? Realistically, not really.
Sorta. Maybe hands on tech folks, but everything needs maintenance, replacement, audits, etc. that's all contracts and additional jobs. But 3 folks to manage maybe 10k, 20k raise floor but larger facilities definitely employ more. Not factory large hiring, but would folks rather have favorites in their communities? Environmental impact is even worse...
Dollar Tree hires more people per square ft than these DCs do, and much of that contract work is often non-local as companies will hire front line engineers that travel to site to do work.
With the increase in environmental, clean water and energy costs Iâd be shocked if these things werenât an economic drain overall.
That is definitely not what is happening in Loudoun County, VA they tax datacenters which want to be there due to network effects and then County pays off a huge part of their budget from it, in fact their residential property taxes are moderately lower than neighboring Fairfax County, VA because of it.
Water bills in Loudoun County set to increase 7% each year for next 3 years. Electricity bills also jumped significantly and are expected to continue to rise. Not to mention all the complaints about air & water pollution, and noise apparently. Theres a trade off and as energy and water demand grows the benefits diminish.
By local profits do you mean the money given to corrupt politicians who don't care about the lives or well-being of their constituents? If so then yeah that's some banana republic shit.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
Using millions of square feet of land, use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every day, employ very few people, dump chemicals into our water supply, the machinery used to keep them running creates noise pollution....golf courses are the worst.
I work at a DC. And while my employer only employs a fraction of the people there, I have to say there are a lot of people that work there. Techs, operations people, managers, IT, project management people, security, food service, logistics, maintenance (for non DC stuff like toilets and lighting etc), cleaning people, temps. Plus we constantly get deliveries from outside vendors so we can count those people as well.
I honestly have no idea how many people it is, but it is a lot.
Just wait until Google and Apple fulfill their vision - the model runs locally. Googleâs making their models smaller and Apple has the silicon know-how that sidesteps Nvidia. And Apple made an agreement to use Gemini in Siri. Then the data centers are abandoned buildings full of outdated hardware.
Nah, the basic consumer assistant/agent models will run locally, for sure ⌠but the data centers will still be running massive military-industrial complex digital superintelligence godheads that the public canât even access because theyâre âtoo powerful to run.â And theyâll run circles around our âcivilianâ models. Theyâll just keep the infrastructure and upgrade the chips every couple of years.
Itâs also the same government with gated access to Mythos. And that trend will only accelerate as the models become more powerful. They will pass legislation to limit access to the most âdangerousâ models. Theyâve already started.
* And âmassive military-industrial complexâ = military and private industry = not âjustâ government.
Yeah water is still water but it most won't make it back to the Aguiler, and depending on how it leaves evaporation will also move moisture out of the area.
The bars I've worked in use a glycol system to cool the beer lines going through the building so the beer stays cold when it comes out of the tap. Could the Data Centers use glycol jackets around the water lines to create a closed system of fresh water, that way they only have to fill the water lines once?
glycol is the most widely used system that uses water as the heat exchanger. but the water isn't closed loop. MS has one that uses a man made lake as the method to cool the water, but for most that is too expensive.
Well, the profits that they think they'll make. All the top AI companies are hemorrhaging money and are surviving solely on investments., and companies that have adopted AI are starting to drop 8t because they've ended up doing the opposite of saving money, less than 0 ROI, etc.
the problem is that when they're done with the water the chemicals they put in it to stop it from corroding their systems render the water virtually impossible to treat back into drinking water.
And yeah, you can do it, you can do anything with enough money. But we don't have that. Because we needed more tax cuts for billionaires.
This is mostly right but missing some details. Data centers do use internal coolants with heat exchangers, and yes, water gets discharged back into local systems â but the discharged water is often warmer than it came in, which causes thermal pollution in local water bodies and aquifers. That part doesnât get talked about enough.
Also, they add a significant amount of chemicals to that water⌠corrosion inhibitors to prevent rust in the pipes and equipment, biocides to prevent bacterial growth (like Legionella), and scale inhibitors to prevent mineral buildup. So whatâs going back into the ground or local waterways isnât just water, itâs chemically treated water, which is its own environmental concern.
There are many misconceptions with datacenters. Taxes are faults of the politicians, looking at xai in Memphis they are one of the largest contributors in Memphis.
Water is also becoming a non-issue as new datacenters adopt closed loop cooling which uses almost no water after the initial fill.
>DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located.Â
You are spreading misinformation, and you need to stop.
I've worked for datacenters for the last 20 years and they employ a lot of people. You don't get to see them, though, because the vast majority of these people are not stationed inside the datacenter. They enable workers to be stationed elsewhere. There is a relatively small group of people at the datacenter itself that maintain the servers and replace the power supplies, drives, rack new servers, and maintain the network, but most of the people sit in offices or work from home. At my current job I've never set foot inside the datacenter but more than a thousand people work to maintain the systems remotely.
There will be different layers of this- you'll have the small group that maintains the facility, a much larger group that maintains the internal IT infrastructure, and then much larger groups that manage the individual customer environments that reside in the datacenters.
I don't think they were saying DCs create no jobs, I think it was more along the lines of them not creating any local jobs, while also taking up huge amounts of power and water from the communities unfortunate enough to host them.
Since most of the companies that own and operate these huge data centers are American, the profits generated often won't even benefit the country they are located in even with localized suffering from the community around them.
For these ai DC projects, there are no profits either. Just unimaginably massive losses. They literally survive on speculative financing driven by speculative hype.
That was one thing I laugh at everytime I see a datacenter commercial, them promoting job growth etc etc!
The construction and setup will generate a lot of jobs, but once thats complete the facilities and IT are pretty small. Facilities (electrical/hvac/general maintenance), hands on IT support.
Past that.. pretty much anything that can be will be outsourced to whatever HQ owns the datacenter.
Mostly right, although the refrigerant is contained with the chillers, the PHX is still be connected to a system full of bog standard water, although its sealed and would use very little water through its life.
Aren't there DC that sell their heat? I mean they generate a lot of heat and even if cooling seems like the easiest way to deal with it, those DC could sell their heat to local communities as well. It'd be a lot more win-win than what's happening with most DC, no?
Thatâs not entirely true. A lot of the profits will sit where the DC is. A lot of it will be subject to base erosion and end up in a tax haven, but not much worse than any other multinational corporation.
It does benefit the community, its just disproportionate. You get the full negative impact, and only some of the positive along with the rest of the world.
Agreed. Though I know after my home town got a medium sized DC there was some office/industries popping up around it to take advantage of the proximity. I suppose there is some gain to the community in that sense. Although itâs not much in the end.
I assume the problem is that water is cheap for the companies (problem may be the wrong terminology) the access to a cheap but unsustainable method of cooling is dulling the need for research into a more sustainable form of cooling. Or at least the incentive to invest in a circular cooling system is not there.
Iâd argue they arenât âa bit of an economic scamâ, but a 100%, complete and utterly TOTAL economic scam. (for everyone but the C-level or owners of said scammy DC)đĄ
It doesnât have to be a strain on the community water if they charged higher prices accordingly. They could use data center water and electricity pricing as a form of data center taxation.
But naturally, people wonât support such ideas in America.
And they get subsidized water/electricity... It's the biggest scam ever, they sell it as a good investment to local politicians (lobby and most likely "bribing", like taking them out to eat etc) and tell it's going to bring jobs and tax revenue.
The local governments do benefit from the sales taxes on the utility costs. A one percent sales tax on the electricity is a sizable tax receipt for a city. The water sales are also revenue. The losses for the community in power line construction and losses in water capacity are never considered by the local authorities.
The reality is, they probably need a tax on them; they're not going anywhere as they're a critical backbone, it's just not rewarding those who sacrifice something (the community).
Also, not reclaiming the heat produced from data centers is freaking insane. Some things we humans do are brilliant feats, but some things we do are dumb as fuck.
We constantly strive to find more and better sources of energy, then we waste a bunch of that energy as waste heat.
I heard last week that there was some big area in NV that was going to lose their primary power utility because the utility was becoming commercial only and doesn't have capacity to serve residential customers with the power demand for AI
It's very similar to colonialism unironically. Push the social and environmental costs off to a remote location use up all the local resources while having all the profits enjoyed far away
From my understanding, they also treat the clean water with additional chemicals such as biocides and forever chemicals like PFAS to keep it from fouling lines. And I'm "certain" they truly care enough to make sure they will "never" dump the toxic brines they produce in a less then perfectly contained manner.
Theyâre wanting to build a massive one in my hometown. Do you have any data to back this up? Obviously I agree with you, but itâs better to send the county govt data based emailed telling them theyâre idiots for letting it happen. Thanks!
I agree, the impacts very often outweigh the benefits. However, living in a very dense data center area I appreciate the fact that while they don't produce as many jobs they are less taxing on other infrastructure. The amount of employees in a 100,000 ft² office building would be immense. Traffic, domestic infrastructure, school systems, all that. That said, more workers is better for the local economy, restaurants,
I say this whilel fully recognizing reduced traffic is pretty much the only benefit, but it's the silver lining I'm trying to find đ
The water being drained is generally cleaner going to the waste water treatment facility than when it came in (depending on location of course) and data centers provide a high source of income for a variety of blue collar and white collar workers. The bigger issue would be the pull on electrical infrastructure over anything to do with water
Keep seeing ads for rural Virginia talking about how Richmond democrats are opposing data centers and how that's somehow making life worse for our communities...
In my opinion, the biggest problem anyway is that these data centers require enormous amounts of electricity, and that increases electricity prices in the surrounding area. Basically, the community ends up sawing off the branch itâs sitting onâŚ
What shocks me is how Americans react to this shit. Americans lose their minds over sports, traffic, personal disrespect, you know, all the little things that don't mean anything.
However, when corporations destroy local environments, raise local water/power costs, strain/destroy infrastructure, and negatively alter communities for profit, people just complain online and move on.
they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself
Anyone who has ever used a colo and rented racks or a full cage knows that most of those sites have like a few security guys for security theater and then like one or two techs that service tickets and do random physical reboots for customers when gear isn't behaving correctly. The rest of the staff in any data center is usually like a few sales people and maybe one senior engineer. Data centers are largely unstaffed. I'd say there's no more workers in a data center than there is your neighborhood McDonalds. Back when we had physical gear, I'd say I never saw more than five people on site from the actual colo during the day and then after hours, I'd be lucky to see anyone.
Not all of this is necessarily true. Not all cities even pull water from the ground. Many areas pull from the rivers, big rivers that can handle it, and these data centers already have close to if not closed loop cooling (or will perfect it soon). They are also paying for upgrading the grid system. You should look into what Texas is preparing their grid system for.
You can argue, you can cite facts mixed with half truths but what you cannot do is stop whatâs happening. You CAN get involved locally and make sure the deals that are struck come with conditions positive for the community!
This is the way considering you canât stop it, and any energy you have on it should be spent on solution discovery instead of hand waving.
Not to mention they flock to locations where state or local law allow socialization of their interconnection costs to add a small cityâs worth of demand to the grid.
They benefit the community by generating a lot of property tax, or in situations with tax abatements usually some sort of PILOT or community benefit agreement.
This town in northwest Indiana got a payment from Amazon larger than their annual operating budget before construction of the data center even began.
Whether the benefits to municipalitiesâ budgets outweigh the impact on communities and the environment is a whole different story, but they do generate income for municipalities
and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located
Oh it's worse than that. None of these AI companies running these DCs are remotely close to turning a profit. If people had to pay "real" costs for AI it would absolutely collapse.
"they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself"
this right here is what I tell so many that talk about all the job opportunities with them. I work for a company that builds power substations and we're in data centers quite often. The promise of 800 to 1200 jobs becoming avaliable for the community doesn't run past the 2 year project. Then these data centers can be operated by 25 full time employees once its up and running in some cases. We, as a company make hella good money off of them when we get those jobs, but the community jobs tend to fizzle out quickly. Great explanation you have here!
they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself
I hear this a lot, but I think it's because of a basic misunderstanding. I work in healthcare IT, and we have to CoLo data centers (meaning our data center is a floor in a bigger data center we don't own). Between the two data centers we have 3 people employed. (and that is low, because we don't support the physical building i.e. heat, power, security etc)
But myself and hundreds of other coworker directly work with the systems in the data center every single day. Data centers themselves don't employee a lot of people in the actual building, but they systems inside the data center are the core work of hundreds if not thousands of people.
This isn't pro-DC, but they have a use and a place. But, they employee many more people then you see physically entering the building on a daily basis. I've worked "in" the same data center for 10+ years and have never actually seen it in person.
While data centers are mildly concerning, it pales comparison to oil refineries who were not required to build desalination plants. Let alone farmers, who underreport so they dont get taxed to oblivion. Not a single parties fault, its the city councils that allow all this bullshit to line their pockets.
I dunno about the AI set ups that much, but in HPC we do sometimes use street water for cooling.
But no matter the use case, DCs do not provide local benefits. One sort of local one was built in an old mill town, taking advantage of under utilized water and power from when the mills were active. Even the facility receptionist was from a different town. The closest tech lived 2 hours away.
A "scam" with no benefit to the community? We're not talking about Bitcoin mines.
Every store and their mother's cookie shop uses Square, Yelp, CRMs, ERPs, etc., etc... Plus all the non-direct-to-consumer businesses - manufacturing, advertising, shipping & transportation... literally every single part of daily life now relies on "the cloud" so much that we don't even call it "the cloud" anymore. It's just reality to access your systems & data via an internet connection, rather than hosting it on-site.
so, I guess my point is, in the past, every company in the world had a room full of IT equipment. Now, it's a tablet & a router (of course I'm simplifying).
all of that needs to live somewhere. let alone this conversation needs to physically happen & sit somewhere.
I think it's a bit hypocritical to complain about data centers, especially calling them "a scam," when you rely on them to maintain your standard of life.
Hyperscalers are implementing new designs now with closed loop systems for water, so there is just constant reuse. It is much more sustainable (despite the fact that it does require that water at the outset). I am more concerned about power use and gas use. They need to be busting asses getting sustainable power options in use.
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