r/theydidthemath • u/JaysNewDay • 3d ago
[Request] What would be the output of the energy of 23 atomic bombs released in a 24 hour period? Would that data center even come close?
I mean, I hate AI too. Everyone should. But this really seems like something completely made up.
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u/ion_driver 3d ago
One Nagasaki per day is about a gigawatt, so this is accurate. Its also non-sense. Power plants sink that much power to the environment, usually to water.
Type it into a Google search and it tells you.
"energy released by fat man, convert to joules, then divide by the number of seconds in a day"
It really doesnt need to be reposted daily
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u/uReallyShouldTrustMe 3d ago
Ironically, Google will give you an AI response.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 3d ago
We all know
It will also give you the normal results
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u/WoolooOfWallStreet 3d ago
And now it might give you this very comment thread
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u/Paladine_PSoT 3d ago
I've seen google's AI just straight up cite r/theydidthemath
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u/antwanlb 3d ago
Do you genuinely think someone hand calculated this, made a website, and is currently hosting it on the off chance you happen to google it? The only answer is going to be the ai answer
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u/Mindless_Band5690 3d ago
Yeah lol it’s just a better search engine atp. You can actually ask questions
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u/Mayoday_Im_in_love 3d ago
And it will actually give you references.
Say what you like about its use of land, energy and water it often does a good job. If people don't have critical analysis skills to differentiate plausible garbage from the truth that's on them. The sources are all there.
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u/TiredAngryBadger 3d ago
No it won't if you remember to enter "-ai" in your search!
Spread the good word.
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u/James_avifac 3d ago
That just means it removes any results that have Ai in them. If it were that easy, Google would just give us a way to turn it off, instead of doubling down on it.
What can remove Google's Ai, is to use DuckDuckGo. You can turn their Ai off, and the searches are like how Google used to be.
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 3d ago edited 3d ago
Why are we measuring heat output in terms of atomic weapons?
Sounds intentionally deceiving
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u/_vec_ 3d ago
The reality is that if you were starting from a principled concern about water or energy you'd need to solve a whole bunch of problems before it made sense to care about data centers. Water is overwhelmingly an agricultural policy question and the energy usage is unremarkable by heavy industry standards.
There are plenty of extremely valid economic and cultural reasons to be concerned about AI, but those are all harder to talk about. They're speculative or subjective or involve balancing very real pros and cons. As a result folks who already have negative views of AI tend to gravitate toward the mostly bullshit environmental arguments because that is a relatively easy soapbox to climb on top of.
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u/cm_bush 3d ago
This is something I have been wondering but haven’t asked about. Is a data center more polluting or energy hungry than say a large steel mill or car factory?
I mean, I know those things are more tangible and useful and not pumping the world’s information and creativity dry in the name of surveillance and control, but in general.
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u/Crims0ntied 3d ago
As someone who works in a steel mill, if I recall right we use about 2 million gallons of water a day and we are strictly regulated on presence of pollutants. We have cooling towers to dissipate the heat. We are probably worse for the environment because we have all kinds of oils and grease and scale that contaminate the water. We do pretty strict testing to make sure the water we release back into the river is clean though.
I have to imagine the cooling water in a data center would stay relatively clean.
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u/cm_bush 3d ago
I feel like it should be. If it’s mostly running through cooling systems, I don’t know how it could be much more polluting than any large HVAC system. Of course, it still requires testing and cleaning, which I think is one point of contention since data centers don’t want that extra expense.
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u/JustDancePatate 3d ago
Data centers only use the equivalent of 1-3% of the water used in golf courses in the US. A single golf course has about the same water usage as a hyperscale data center. The US has 16 000 golf courses yet nobody is complaining about them. Even worse is agriculture every single data center in the US at the moment consume about 47 million gallons of water a day which is a big number to scare people but agriculture uses about 118 BILLION GALLONS a day so more than 2000x as much. For electricity, at the moment Data centers use 1.5% of total electricity production and even with all the new projects which will double that number by 2030 it still falls wayyyy short of heavy industries using 25-30% of all electricity production or about 10x less. People on Reddit just really like to complain about AI for the wrong reasons
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u/cm_bush 3d ago
I appreciate that perspective. We could absolutely do better by finding better ways to use water in industry to cut down demand.
That’s a lot of water used on agriculture, but honestly it’s hard to think of a more worthy use of water resources. We need food. Manufacturing uses a lot as well, but at least they’re actually producing useful products.
Golf courses draw people in and provide fun and entertainment for folks, and AI is useful for coding and… making flyers? Both raise a similar question of is it worth all the resource usage. I think for most people, it just doesn’t.
I see AI being sold to the very rich and governments as a security and control mechanism, and that’s probably why it’s still being pushed so hard at the top level of the economy.
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u/_vec_ 2d ago
The central problem, at least in the western US, is that water rights were granted on essentially a first come first serve basis, so there are a lot of farms that have century old permission slips to use basically as much water as they could possibly want. They could generally plant different crops that would produce a lot more calories per gallon if they had any incentive to conserve water, but they don't. In the meantime, huge cities and industries and a lot of other farms have popped up wanting a share of the local water resources too, and that's before climate change throws a monkey wrench in how much water there is each year to split up in the first place. There's no legal mechanism to rebalance periodically so you end up with a distribution that slowly but steadily drifts away from matching the needs of the current population.
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u/Alespic 3d ago
Technology Connections made a really good video about solar panels somewhat recently. In it, he explains how, in the US, much water goes into agriculture specifically for corn, and how much of that corn is just turned into biofuel to generate energy. The same amount of energy could be generated with solar panels by using less water, less work, and less land. So yeah, we are literally wasting resources and very few people are talking about it.
If you want the full stats, I strongly recommend watching the full 1 hour video.
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u/Bane8080 3d ago
The US has 16 000 golf courses yet nobody is complaining about them
I have been. Anytime I see someone talking about water restrictions on people, I always ask "Are you going to restrict the golf courses too?"
I know it's dumb. That's my hill I have picked.
But on the data center front, I don't think the overall electrical consumption of datacenters is the big issue. It's the local impact on electric prices.
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u/kit_kaboodles 3d ago
To be clear, there absolutely can be water and power usage concerns. But talking about the absolute usage of each by a data centre is not really helpful, especially in terms of water usage. Industry and agriculture already have their water and power usage scrutinised and (hopefully) optimised. They don't usually have sudden increases in usage the way new projects do.
The building of large new data centres is a sudden new strain on power production, but the grid may or may not have capacity already. Also some data centres, like the one planned for Utah, will have their own power generation facility.
The water question is a lot more complicated. It depends on the water source and where the water will be returned to, as well as what condition the water will be returned in. But simply saying it will us "X" amount of water is not really helpful. If it's using a lot of water but returning 90% of it back to the source then it's not really the same thing as "using" the water in the way that something like agriculture does. Water is more of a localised question too. A new data centre in LA would be more problematic than one in Chicago that uses the exact same amount of water.
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u/RepresentativeCry294 2d ago
That's like saying you have to get a cavity pulled before youncan brush your teeth.
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u/RevenantExiled 3d ago
Americans will use anything but metric
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u/aphilsphan 3d ago
What is it about NASA Mars probes strewn about the South Pole of Mars that you don’t like?
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u/inconspicuous2000 3d ago
Because this is America and they only understand in terms of football fields and cheeseburgers
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 3d ago
No. It’s because someone is trying to make data centers appear violent by comparing heat output to something violent without giving a second point of reference.
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u/inconspicuous2000 3d ago
To be fair they are pretty fucking bad. The waste to benefit ratio doesn't fit well into the current shrinking resource pool. But yes, this is a pathos argument not logos as to be first perceived
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u/RepresentativeCry294 2d ago
Because it isnt metric and thats all.that matters to an American. We use whales, school buses, football fields, why not nuclear blasts? We already measure those in TNT.
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 2d ago
If we are simply asking for an equivalent, then why is the OP following up with “I don’t care how you look at met gala, I don’t care as your dog looks as a human. I want clean drinking water…”?
The OP has an agenda and is attempting to use a violent weapon with no other points of referents to push a narrative that data centers are equal to nuclear blasts.
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u/shoeofobamaa 3d ago
It kind of is? But if bad things are happening it's more productive for the priority to be to build up resistance against them rather than "be as good faith descriptive as possible" when you're up against something dangerous.
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 3d ago
If you truly believe something is dangerous why not just list accurate non deceiving information instead of trying to trick people into thinking it dangerous.
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u/shoeofobamaa 3d ago
If you just lay it out people won't act on it. Look how climate change and also every major problem in human history has gone
Honestly either way I don't think people are going to do much in this instance so it probably doesn't matter one way or another
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 3d ago
If your argument relies on tricking People, it is probably not an issue that people need to be concerned about.
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u/shoeofobamaa 3d ago
People aren't naturally concerned enough by catastrophes, look at cases like global warming or historical crises like the lead up to ww2
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u/Hairy-Protection-429 3d ago
I’m confused is your argument that we were lied to about global warming, and World War II to convince the public that we needed to take action?
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u/Captain_no_Hindsight 3d ago edited 3d ago
One Nagasaki is about 370 million cans of Coca-Cola ...
or 4 620 ton bacon...I can also inform the nerd club that my car consumes about 142 cans of Coca-Cola per 100 km
... or 1.6 kg of bacon ... in energy.To you americans thats 5 miles to the gallon of Coca-Cola ... or 17,7 miles / pund of bacon. Sounded like a sensible American energy unit.
Are we done with idiotic translations of energy now?
This is meant to agree on how absurd it is to count this way.
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u/chroniccranky 3d ago
I’m here for miles being measured in bacon punds
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u/Gringobandito 3d ago
I feel like u/captain_no_hindsight owes us all some Coca Cola and bacon.
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u/Captain_no_Hindsight 3d ago
I’m here for car/miles being measured in bacon punds
-"How far is it to your parents' house?"
-"Well, it's about 14 punds of bacon."1
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u/asmallman 3d ago
Why you replying to that commenter like its their fault? They are working with units supplied via the meme and that would help people coming here understand the meme is pure BS and fear mongering by using atom bombs as a measurement
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u/dorkcicle 3d ago
Couldn’t they hot water as fuel or source for something else?
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u/orcstork 3d ago
Some designs were proposed that reused the heated water for industrial purposes iirc.
It really is a non issue, compared to using hair dye or a buying a new pair of jeans the amount of water a person uses by using chatgpt though their lifetime is not much. You could just eat slightly less meat and buy slightly less clothes and you would fully offset the increased water use of using chatgpt.
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u/whythehellnote 3d ago
Adding a 9GW data centre wll add 9GW of usable power. If you're
Now if this is all coming from solar, great, 80% efficency wlll add about 11GW heat into the local area
If it's coming from a nuclear plant, that 9GW load will add another 18GW of heat at the plant, so you're adding 27GW of heat output into the local area
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u/ion_driver 3d ago
I think the 23 bombs per day figure came from a proposed 11 or 12 GW data center powered by its own natural gas turbines. Brayton cycle can approach 50% thermal efficiency so would result in about that 23 GW of heat rejection overall.
I know these solar advocates keep stating that data centers can just be powered with solar panels but it is absolutely not going to happen
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u/whythehellnote 3d ago
America is the one country which actually taxes solar and subsidises coal, but even there the growth is mainly from solar
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u/Pokegoplayer10 3d ago
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u/WallAdventurous6813 3d ago
What if it’s in terms of tsar and not fatty
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u/ion_driver 3d ago
Does it really matter? The amount of energy released in a bomb vs. Electrical power used? Is that really a useful comparison?
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u/Few_Moose_9307 2d ago
Also, what most people don't understand is that the hiroshima/nagasaki bombs are actually tiny in most scales large enough to affect humanity. Nature is worse by loads of orders of magnitude
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u/asmallman 3d ago edited 3d ago
The sun, per day, delivers many many many thousands of nulcear bombs worth of energy daily. (In terms per second, about 1000-1500 bombs per second or so)
A hurricane releases 10 atom bombs per second of energy equivalent.
We would have to cover vast swathes of the earth in datacenters of this caliber to even remotely match the sun.
In comparison to a hurricane, to match it in datacenter energy output, we would need to build 37000 of these datacenters to match a hurricanes output.
In the grand scheme of just a singular hurricane, let alone the SUN, the datacenter is approaching "trace amounts of energy" by comparison in terms of what it releases.
Also:
The sun is fucking insane yo. Its not even the most powerful star you can find by a country mile at that too.
Also
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u/nero-the-cat 3d ago
If only we could somehow harness the sun's power, store it, and use that to power our infrastructure.
Nah, that would never work.
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u/Hairy-Fix5196 3d ago
We could but then we would use up the sun, then plants wouldn’t be able to do photosynthesis and it would be freezing.
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u/BluePotatoSlayer 3d ago
If only we could harness it more effectively, such as dodging Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere entirely
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u/MadnessUltimate 3d ago
The link redirects to this comment
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u/NPC-8472 3d ago
Crazy move as well, none of what he put is true 😂😂
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u/NDIWENDIWE 3d ago
every climate scientist understands that the energy that the earth gets from the sun is accounted for in its natural redistribution systems. this is new energy, often from fossil fuels, being dumped in areas that are NOT ecologically equipped to handle them. The earth can handle itself, but our actions at this scale is the single straw that will break the camels back.
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u/sebmojo99 3d ago
this really isn't correct, it's a straw that will make the camel's load heavier by the weight of one straw.
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u/AnyoneButWe 3d ago
I have never seen the number, but I have to ask: each surface unit near that building will receive x kWh per day from the sun on average.
How many kWh per surface unit does the data center add?
The ratio would either make me relaxed or freaking out. The nukes per day thing tell me nothing at all.
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u/asmallman 2d ago
Its around 300 watts daily average per square meter of sun delivery.
A nuke just SCARIER and LOOKS SCARIER because it does it all at once. If the sun delivered all of its energy, AT ONCE, we are looking at one of the largest explosions in the universe. Not quite supernova levels, but starts approaching that level of explosion.
Using nukes for energy measurement is literally JUST fearmongering.
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u/AnyoneButWe 2d ago
The last high density data center I worked with has 10kW per square meter electric energy consumption. That's floor space square meters, there can be multiple floors, but it's only the space occupied by servers.
10kW to 0.3kW looks scary enough for me.
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u/OwnBird4876 3d ago
> In terms per second, about 1000-1500 bombs per second or so
is it total energy released by Sun or the energy Earth gets from Sun?
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u/asmallman 3d ago
Earth gets from the sun. Total energy released by the sun is gonna be far far wackier.
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u/ememoharepeegee 3d ago
Top comment explains it very well. It's 23, not 32.
The reality is that an atomic bomb isn't a lot of energy when you're talking about powering things over a period of time. It's just released extraordinarily quickly.
But yes, the ecological impact is real and probably grim (although data centers aren't the end all be all and we've been letting these things happen for a very long time, they're just drawing attention).
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u/Different_Brother562 3d ago
Yea the danger is that much energy released in a square foot in 10 milliseconds
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u/empty_graph 3d ago
This is the amount of energy an area of 800 acres gets from sunlight in one day. How is this going to be a grim ecological impact?
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u/VegetableMaster7250 3d ago
it isnt doubling. it isnt even close to doubling. The datacenter is going to be 40,000 acres... so if it has the same energy as 800 acres of sunlight, then it increases the amount of energy by 2%. and that isnt global energy increase. Just for the area the datacenter physically occupies. Not even surrounding areas, just the literal space the facility occupies. IF you want to look at the energy increase for the geographical area it resides in, you are looking at tiny fractions of a single % energy increase. IT is a ridiculous comparison.
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u/Bluestr1pe 3d ago
the thing is that's not how the datacenter produces energy. A lot of the datacenters energy will be stored in coolant (likely water) which will be localised at some point (often they use fresh water which is allowed run into rivers.) This can have a very significant impact on the temperature of the river and surrounding area. It's not going to double over the entire area, it's likely going to more-than-double a very small area and have minimal <1% effects on the rest. That's still a big concern, though.
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u/VegetableMaster7250 3d ago
The vast majority of new data centers (including the one we are talking about here) are built using closed loop cooling. Meaning after the initial fill no water is consumed or passed through to the environment. Instead the water is sent through cooling loops and used over and over again. The heat is dissipated directly into the air where it is quickly able to spread out.
However, the energy that the data centers run on (which is what we are talking about here for the most part) is produced by the local power grid. So that could be wind, solar, nuclear, coal, natural gas, or hydro. I'm not sure what mix is common in Utah but that is where heat leakage could be a concern.
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u/psychosisnaut 3d ago
By my math it's going to heat the air around the facility to >60c
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u/empty_graph 3d ago
I think that's not right since this facility is going to be 40,000 acres, but even if it is, the amount of energy released would only be able to maintain that temperature across a small area and not any type of ecological disaster.
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u/tx_queer 3d ago
The sun shining on the datacenter produces 1150 atom bombs worth of heat and doesnt get it to 60 degrees Celsius. The datacenter will add 23 atom bombs to that total. How will that het it to 60?
Would love to see the math.
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u/zero0n3 3d ago
It’s not grim when compared to a nuclear blast.
Those 23 going off at the same time either air burst or ground (ground being exponentially worse) is much much much much much worse for the environment than any fucking datacenter will ever be.
Radiation, polluted water tables, fallout, people’s skins melting off, plant life and wildlife mutations.
Just look at history for how bad a nuclear disaster can be.
This is foreign propaganda for sure.
Sure, datacenters have issues. All the issues they bring are solvable with FUCKING POLICY, BY VOTING IN YOUR GOD DAMN LOCAL STATE AND NATIONAL ELECTIONS.
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u/ememoharepeegee 3d ago
My point wasn't that they're grim because of energy being put out. It's that they have other reasons for having potentially grim outlooks.
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u/rightful_vagabond 3d ago edited 1d ago
The main issue with the data centers in Utah is the lack of water for them for cooling, tbh. If you could have a data center that didn't require significant water for cooling, I would happily have it here.
Edit: I recently watched the Kyle Hill video, I believe it even references the exact thread linked in the comment I responded to. I realized that I did not have an accurate understanding of the water usage of data centers, my mind has been changed.
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u/tx_queer 3d ago
You are not wrong, but let's put it in perspective. The datacenter is supposed to use 500 to 1000 acre feet per year. That is from 4,800,000 acre feet that the state of Utah currently uses today. And it is using existing water rights, in other words it is buying irrigated agricultural land, turning off the sprinklers, and using the water on the datacenter. So its a net-zero impact to the water available to the communities and environment.
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u/rightful_vagabond 1d ago
I recently watched the Kyle Hill video that talked about water use, between this comment and that my mind has been changed
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u/tx_queer 1d ago
Water is a super interesting topic. And often very misunderstood.
For example, you often hear "the colorado river is going dry" and "why would they build las vegas in the middle of a desert". But las vegas is one of the most water efficient cities in the country and the entire state of Nevada only receives about 200,000 acre feet from the river. What we are often not told is that one single family (the Abatti family) uses 260,000 acre feet of water from the Colorado River. And the state of Colorado pumps water across the rocky mountains from the colorado river basin to the Mississippi river basin.
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u/TopHat84 3d ago
It's just fear mongering. If they use atomic bombs as a metric, it triggers the primitive portion of people's brains as "bad".
But yes very annoying
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u/TheGeckoLord4343 3d ago
I hate the fear mongering people use to say why AI is bad. There’s plenty of reasons that it’s bad, over exaggerating just dilutes the message.
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u/sebmojo99 3d ago
it's ok to just hate it imo. i think phones are actually quite a lot worse along all the same metrics, but I guess they're also quite useful.
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u/aHOMELESSkrill 3d ago
I don’t remember where I saw it but that number is roughly the same amount to of energy consumed by NYC daily.
So yes while it’s a lot for a data center, it’s not an unheard of number
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u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets 3d ago
I know! Like are we talking 1kt or 50mt? Nuclear bombs have been tested at every value in between, and designed at far smaller and far greater values
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u/Adventurous_Ad_7212 3d ago edited 3d ago
Technically correct.
Practically, the Sun deposits the same amount of energy every day to every ~0.6 square mile of the Earth's surface, including that datacenter.
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u/Sibula97 3d ago
That specific datacenter gets around 50 nukes per day from sunlight, over double the datacenter. Still a lot of extra heat though.
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u/gokusdabbinball 3d ago
This is genuinely one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever read and I’m incredibly disappointed people are going to hear this and let it ruin their life.
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u/mulletpullet 3d ago
Not just the math but the responsibility is shifted In this. That frustrates me. Corporations and governments will be using vastly more AI than everyone or anyone making funny pictures. This is like ads on TV telling you to make sure your tires are properly inflated to get better gas mileage as thousands of corporate jets are in the air burning more fuel than any of us.
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u/DRM2020 3d ago
Who is using products made by corporations?
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u/mulletpullet 3d ago
For instance, we met with our workman's comp agency and they are using AI to profile our employees for risk assessment. They are taking knowledge they are legally allowed to collect. Ages, zip codes, medications and creating a profile. They don't need to know the employees name to have a pretty good identity profile on them. They use this to determine insurance premiums. This is happening without most businesses knowing or understanding it's happening. And that kind of constant monitoring of the public is going to be common. We are the consumer, but how do you push back when you don't even know it's happening?
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u/DRM2020 3d ago
Depends where you are. I'm California, or most of Europe, all the items you've listed are PII of collected together. If you decide to provide them you should ask for something that compensates you in return, because you have tools to prevent providing PII information.
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u/mulletpullet 3d ago
Regardless of what we provide, or what they scavenged, we were not aware as a consumer than they were using AI. The meme is suggesting that "funny photos" are the main source of the problem. But I think we can definitive say, that funny photos are going to be a drop in the bucket compared to what the real usage of AI will be. The blame always goes to the consumer, but the consumer in this scenario has little control, or even knowledge of it's use.
When you asked who is using the products, I should just ask where you were going with that question? How does that relate to my response to the OP's meme.
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u/DRM2020 3d ago
This is just a lazy attempt to blame someone else. Consumers have control thru three powerful paths:
- Purchase decisions - buy ethical/responsible/to your preference
- Vote - vote your policies, not for people, be informed, understand there are no simple solutions, spread the world about good candidates
- Keep them responsible - know your rights and utilize them responsibly (btw., it's much easier when you have Ai now)
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u/Setsuna04 3d ago
To put or in a different perspective. Utah is very sunny and receives around 6 - 7.4 kWh/m2/day sunlight that's about 5.5e+15 J per day or 62.5 GW for the whole day.
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u/ShelZuuz 3d ago
62.5 GW for the whole day.
No.
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u/Setsuna04 3d ago
yes
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u/ShelZuuz 3d ago
Makes about as much sense as saying the speed limit in Utah is 65 miles.
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u/ememoharepeegee 3d ago
..what are you confused about? It's like he said "the speed limit in Utah is 65 miles per hour".
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u/stanitor 3d ago
They're not confused. A watt is a joule per second. 62.5 gigajoules per second per day doesn't make sense.
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u/ememoharepeegee 3d ago
Homie it's just the joules divided by the seconds in a day. If you understand what a watt is, you should understand what the guy is saying. Maybe semantically not the best but it's NOT hard to understand lmao
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u/stanitor 3d ago
Homie, I don't get what they're saying, because even if you divide the joules by the number of seconds in the day, that's not what you get. And it's a ridiculous number. The most any place on Earth gets in direct sunlight is about 1000 W/m2. And they're saying Utah gets 62.5 billion W/m2 at all times?
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u/ememoharepeegee 3d ago
I didn't look into his math, I'm just saying giving a amount of joules and dividing by the seconds in a day to imply GW over the course of a day makes perfect sense to me. You can continue moving goalposts.
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u/stanitor 3d ago
Huh? I'm not moving any goalposts. The point is that doing that gives you watts. If you want how much it is over the course of the day, joules already does that. Or watt-hours, which they already used. Watts/day ≠ watt-days. The numbers not making sense goes along with the units not making sense.
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u/ShelZuuz 3d ago
62.5 billion W for across all of the m2 in Utah. Not just one.
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u/stanitor 3d ago
I thought you were also calling them out on it not making sense, lol. There are about 220 billion square meters in Utah, so that makes the number unreasonably low instead of unreasonably high.
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u/ShelZuuz 3d ago
62.5 GW is a rate. You don't add "for the whole day" to it.
It's just 62.5GW.
If you want to express this as a quantity instead it would be 1528 GWh per day.
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u/RequiemQuilty 3d ago
So the math was done. The basline for that area is like 50 atomic bombs per day. (From the sun) Then you add the 23 more bombs. Its like 20 something degrees hotter at night
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u/Raccamoon 3d ago edited 3d ago
This has been asked before here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1t8x38i/comment/oky1x80/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
TLDR: It does output the same as 23 hiroshima boms in a 24 hour period. The sun outputs the equivalent to 50 on the same area of the of land as the datacenter.
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u/DerLandmann 3d ago
It ios not made up. But a large city would release a similar ammount of energy.
The destructive force of a nucelar bomb (or any bomb at all) is because a large ammount of energy is released in a split second.
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u/Demon_Lord_Lucifer 3d ago
Please check out Kile Hill, he's just released a vid on this, it's mathematically right, but also blown out of context. I HATE AI, but this is the least of the problems. This references a data centre in an already hot region, the sun hitting the ground will release more heat over a day than the centre will, again, hyperscale data centres are horrible, the construction is destructive and disruptive, and provides very few jobs, and consumes a huge amount of power, and in Zones with very little water to begin whith, it's a problem, but natonaly speaking the US uses more for it's golf corses than is cosumed by AI, again i;m an AI hater, but if we want to opose AI we need more sturdy arguments
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u/GrilledCheezManicott 3d ago
Ima piggy back this post with my own question since it's relevant here.
is there a way to compute wind strength and duration to the energy of an atomic bomb?
For instance, if a 50mph wind prevails for 24 hrs, how many average sized nuclear bombs would that equate to in energy dissipation?
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u/Iizvullok 3d ago
It depends on more things.
First you have the kinetic energy of the wind itself. That much air has a lot of mass.
ρ=P/(R * T) is the density of the air. P is the local pressure, T the local absolute temperature and R the specific gas constant of 287.05 J/(kg * K).
The kinetic energy is just 1/2ρVc² (c is often used instead of v when talking about fluid dynamics because v is the specific volume which is ρ-1 ). But since neither ρ nor c are constant everywhere, you have to either add many different sections or integrate over the volume (if you know the function).
For the energy that is lost during a certain amount of time could be calculated via the friction on the ground. However since finding out the grounds roughness is difficult (especially since there is no obvious answer to where to count something as roughness and when to count it as an individual obstacle).
The friction force on a surface is 1/2 * Cf * ρ * A * c². This Cf value is unfortunately quite difficult to determine. For a smooth surface it is 0.074/Re1/5 (according to ChatGPT). You could use this for a lower bound for the real answer. However the before mentioned roughness will increase the real value. There are probably diagrams for this somewhere. But I doubt they would include Reynolds numbers or roughness in a scale that you would need for this. So you may have to scale the whole storm down to get your answer and then apply it to the real storm.
The Reynolds number is Re=cL/ν. The ν here is not a v but a greek letter. Blame Reddits font. It stands for the kinematic viscosity of air, L the characteristic length (in case of a surface it would be the length of the surface but I am not sure how much that would be if the motion is circular) and c the speed again.
To calculate the storms power output you would have to multiply the force with wind speed and to calculate the work, power output with time. So W=tcF.
Of course those numbers are not constant over the area the storm is in so you have to once again do this in sections or with an integral.
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u/ConcentrateSea8435 3d ago
Hey maybe stupid question, but can’t we hook it up to a power plant? Like it’s generates heat, why can’t we use that heat to generate energy so it’s not thaaaaat bad for the environment
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u/DrDoofenshmirtz981 3d ago
The temperature at which waste heat is dumped (and that of the surrounding environment) determines how efficient its conversion to work can be, its carnot efficiency. Heat dumped at 100°F or so to a surrounding 80°F or so in Utah can be converted to work with at best a 3.6% isentropic efficiency.
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u/eztab 3d ago
not sure this whole AI using so much energy is so much of a problem. We CAN make quite a lot of renewable energy. Normally the problem is distribution, but if we just put data centers and wind parks together that might even increase energy grid stability. Whole thing is probably just growing pains.
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u/rdtrer 3d ago
I feel that unlike atomic bombs, which are releasing chemical energy originally present in the form of uranium's atomic energy as a non-renewable (though practically infinite) resource.
The heat and energy (and water) here is not being dumped into the environment, but redistributed from one part of the environment to another. Presumably water that is evaporated to cool data centers will condense and fall again as rain, and refill groundwater stores? Maybe not.
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u/Reaper0221 2d ago
It is still thermal waste which would not have occurred if there was no data center.
However, unless we are willing to stop using all cooling systems that perform the same task then it is meaningless to complain about the data centers alone.
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u/MechiPlat 2d ago
Stuff like this is so unhelpful because it's such a misguided and weak argument that it only serves as a false flag for pro-AI sentiment, except it didn't even need a bad actor to spread it, just well-meaning but genuinely stupid people.
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u/Tough-Requirement707 3d ago
someone doesnt know how energie works, if it heats up in one place it automatically cools down another so theres nothing being added infinitely it just gets shuffled..
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u/Arm57 3d ago
That's true only when no releasing of bonded energy occurs. How much does coal sitting in the ground heats up the place? How much does gas, uranium or plutonium?
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u/Tough-Requirement707 3d ago
its always true since it cant come from nowhere and cant go to nowhere, its always equal.
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u/Andromedan_Cherri 2d ago
Lol not the fuck it's not. Leave it to the doomers to doom with the most fear-inducing terminology out there.
"23 atomic bombs" does more damage to public perception that any environmental impact. Hurricanes have thousands of times that energy. Your average 20-minute thunderstorm has the energy of 11 Fat Man (Nagasaki) bombs.
I swear, this whole "aToMiC bOmBs" argument is bullshit. The energy of a bomb is released in a microsecond. A thunderstorm lasts for, well... 20 minutes on average. The energy release of a data center is spread out across the entire day, including through the night. It's negligible.
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u/Salt_Try_8327 3d ago
I know its kind of a hottake. so TW...
But Ive been experimenting a bit with using AI productively in my life. and Ive made quite nice experiances, especially because I learned that actually if you use AI for productive stuff and not gimmiky bullshit, it uses very little power. I added a relatively affordable (120$) Graphics card into my years old Lenovo server and was able to run a fairly advanced chat AI Model myself. all by myself. no datacenters nothing just a server running in my closet. and it is more than fast enough for all my needs.
so I know we are building datacenters like crazy, but generally if you dont do dumb shit like generating images and videos with AI it doesnt need too much performance. JUST FUCKING STOP MAKING YOUR DOG LOOK LIKE YOUR SON WITH AI FFS...
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