10 ms·
We used to build steel mills near cheap power. Now we build datacenters
- jmyeet 3y agoBuilding data centers is fine. Worse, we build Bitcoin mining farms near cheap power, which essentially produces nothing of value and in fact can raise power prices for everyone (eg [1]). [1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-cryptomining-comes-to-town-high-electricity-use-spillovers-to-the-local-economy/ https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...
- reportgunner 3y agoYou could argue advertisement does the same.
- flerchin 3y agoAgree, outlaw them both.
- reportgunner 3y agoReminded me of this scene in equilibrium. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drYovoinEts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drYovoinEts
- hodgesrm 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. If you are like the median HN commenter your job may depend on one or both of them.
- asdfman123 3y agoBut it would be a bad argument. Products necessarily compete for attention. The only way to avoid that would be to implement centrally planned economy.
- sodality2 3y agoProducts compete on merit. Parts of Europe ban political advertising near campaign periods. Yet obviously democracy works just fine. I view product advertisements in the same vein. I can review candidates on their platform and track record, just as I can review products on their merits by researching on my own. I wouldn’t mind if all of the “impulse buys” that no one plans, but gets from an ad, went away.
- hansvm 3y agoThey "compete", but that competition doesn't have to be a push-based model where products insert themselves into unrelated parts of your life vying for dominance (between themselves and over the things in your life you actually care about). If there were a place you could search and have a reasonable expectation of finding just the subset of products worth the price for you personally and able to make your life better, would that count as an ad to you?
- _Algernon_ 3y agoIf data centers powering things that are a net-negative for societies should go, I vote that we start with "social" media.
- brazzy 3y agoDefine "social" media. Does HN count? Why exactly not?
- _Algernon_ 3y agoIn my view Social Media is characterized by being advertisement funded (HN technically fulfills this), being poorly moderated (HN does not fulfill this IMO), being engagement driven (HN isn't) and encouraging parasocial relationships (HN doesn't). HN is closer to a web forum of the 90s than modern social media.
- mrob 3y agoIMO, social media requires a relationship graph, e.g. friends/follows/subscriptions. HN doesn't have this so it's just a forum.
- bluGill 3y agoMost of what people do with social media is just a forum and doesn't need those features.
- realPubkey 3y ago30% of stuff on your "usefull" datacenters is just porn. Then we have 30% gaming servers and so on. Who are you to decide that this is more important as digital currency? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090
- losteric 3y ago30% of internet content, not data center usage. Serving content is relatively light on compute.
- terafo 3y agoNo it's not. Don't even mind sketchy methodology, that number is just 13 years out of date.
- automatic6131 3y agoEven if your numbers were true (and they're not), at least people enjoy games and porn.
- mrguyorama 3y agoPorn is more valueable than speculative trading on an unregulated shadow economy.
- perihelions 3y agoThere was a uranium enrichment plant in the south of France that was colocated with a nuclear power plant. It consumed 3/4th of its power output—2.7 gigawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant - "Three out of four reactors were used for powering the Eurodif Uranium enrichment factory until 2012, the year that Eurodif was closed."
- cesarb 3y agoIn the same vein, I heard in a recent The Tim Traveller video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SQVIZxUrDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SQVIZxUrDg) that a third of the power produced from the coal excavated from one mine was used to power the excavators from that mine.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoThe difference being that in that case, about 1/3 of the power was spent on production, while in the case of the nuclear power plant, less than 1% was. (The uranium enrichment facility produced materials for a lot more than the plant that was powering it.)
- Retric 3y agoYour math seems off. If 75% of 4 nuclear reactors (so 3) was used then they would have needed to be using that uranium for 300+ nuclear reactors for that to represent below 1%. France has never gotten close to those numbers ~300 gigawatts. What seems more believable is if they where making highly enriched uranium for bombs not just reactor grade uranium or the number is larger than 1%.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 666lumberjack 3y agoThat is a seriously impressive amount of power. In case anyone else is curious, it apparently provided fuel for about one hundred nuclear reactors, from that power. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Orano-to-start-dismantling-Georges-Besse-enrichmen https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Orano-to-start-d...
- mlinhares 3y agoI wonder why we don't see datacenters in places with "infinite" potential for electricity generation in cold climates like Iceland. If your workload isn't sensitive to external network latency (you're just crunching numbers or doing long running computation in data you can move there at a normal pace), that sounds very cheap.
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoI’ve wondered that too, and earthquakes/eruptions is my guess. They are more prevalent and unpredictable where geothermal power is available.
- ycom13__ 3y agoThere was this underwater datacenter https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718 see also here: https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
- coffeebeqn 3y agoTalk about difficult maintenance
- ortusdux 3y agoI'd imagine the optics of this have changed with the recent focus on ocean surface temps. I would also bet the negative PR of pumping waste heat directly into cold climates would offset any savings.
- gruturo 3y agoThe heat we directly dump into the environment, except where it affects the local ecosystem directly (e.g. warm rivers killing local wildlife, algae blooms) is a quite laughable portion of the global warming problem - greenhouse gases are multiple orders of magnitude more effective (at being part of the problem). Oceans are insanely large (citation needed) heat sinks.
- luis_cho 3y ago[flagged]
- Gravityloss 3y agoThis is why it doesn't make sense to run your cloud services in those high energy cost places when there's better locations available.
- 1-6 3y agoBut latency matters
- Gravityloss 3y ago3000 km back and forth is 20 ms. The web software I've seen has multiple layers and parts with much larger latencies than that. Requests going through all kinds of layers that are geographically distributed, spammy responses, slow database queries etc. (Postgresql by default doesn't even log anything under 10 ms). Maybe for FPS games it doesn't make so much sense but for everything else...
- jeffbee 3y agoHennessy and Patterson is obviously a major work in our field but its hard numbers are slightly antique. Patterson has produced several papers, talks, and presentations recently that are better informed by being a hyperscaler insider.
- owlstuffing 3y agoAnd China is laughing
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThis is what developing economies do- data centers are a lot more value add than melting ore
- MangoCoffee 3y agoI don't get OP's comment either. The American economy has been mainly service-based. Designed by Apple, and made in China/India/Vietnam.
- yorwba 3y agoBecause of the cheap power available in poor western provinces that can be harnessed for the compute needs of wealthier eastern provinces? https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-179-the-east-west-compute https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-179-the-east-west-compu...
- neallindsay 3y agoSolar farms have made it much cheaper to expand electricity production, but the point of this article is still true: efficiency gains in data centers have a compounding effect.
- bequanna 3y agoI don't think this is the kind of generation they are talking about. Solar is intermittent and you would need expensive energy storage to even things out. I guess unless you can shift your compute usage to match production. Maybe that would work? But then your compute utilization is pry suboptimal. Why own hardware that is only in use 8-12hrs a day?
- terafo 3y agoWhile we are at it, can anyone explain to me why so much power is spent on cooling datacenters to ~20C, when you can just run it "hot" at ~40C with all hardware being just fine and cooling costs being many times lower(also capex costs being lower)? Are my assumptions wrong or is there a good reason for this?
- jartelt 3y agoOne reason cooling is used is to protect the Li-ion or lead acid batteries in the uninterruptible power supplies that provide backup power to the servers. Both Li-ion and lead acid lose calendar life and reliability when operated at 40 C. So, you have extra battery replacement costs and reliability concerns at higher temperature. I also would imagine that you need some type of cooling system even to keep the ambient temperature at 40C. Otherwise the servers are just continuously pumping out heat and the temperature may get high enough to the point where you have equipment issues. It could be the case that the equipment needed to cool to 25C is not that different or more expensive that the equipment needed to maintain a temperature of 40C.
- terafo 3y agoMy impression is that these power supplies are usually in separate rooms or even buildings, so you can have different temperatures there. > *It could be the case that the equipment needed to cool to 25C is not that different or more expensive that the equipment needed to maintain a temperature of 40C. * From what I've heard, cost difference is quite large.
- whynotmaybe 3y agoI guess that the usual range for datacenter temperature must include the eventual human working in it. Usual acceptable legal office temp where I've worked in Europe where between 18°c and 26°c. To allow someone to work out of this range, you'll need to reclassify the workers and provide accommodation for working under "hard conditions". Ex : workers in refrigerated warehouse have specific work time regulation and specific clothing provided by the employer.
- ilovecurl 3y agoAnyone remember Rackable Systems Inc.? Their selling point was all about reducing data center costs by doing all the DC conversion in these massive converters at the top of the cage. They supplied something like 48v down rails in the back of the cage that their servers would then plug into via special connectors on the back of each server. They promised more efficient power conversion and better thermal management amongst other things. I was never comfortable working with/around that stuff. I was always worried about a mishap that could bring me (or the cage itself) into contact with 48v of pure DC doom.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWas their game plan going to be that their power supplies were more efficient than those traditionally in rackmount servers?
- adamsb6 3y agoThis is how the big cloud vendors do, see OCP server and rack designs for an example. IIRC the rack connects to one leg of a three phase and converts to DC inside the rack’s UPS. It’s great for efficiency, but makes a hassle bringing in third party equipment since you need to make accommodations for bringing in the regular AC power that everything else is designed for.
- mrguyorama 3y ago48v DC is just under OSHA's opinion of what you should start being careful with. The heat generated by a short could easily burn you though.
- yummypaint 3y agoThat is plenty to weld with if the current is available. Even a 12 V car battery is serious business.
- threadweaver34 3y agoI was looking into getting a UPS for my server. Some UPSes do power conditioning, and all do AC/DC conversion. I got to wondering why I can't buy a UPS that outputs DC and feed that directly into a silly looking PSU.
- cogman10 3y agoI wish district heating was more of a thing in the US. Unlike a steelmill, A datacenter could go anywhere. so why not plant it in an urban neighborhood, heat up water, and pump the hot water around the neighborhood through a hot water network. Any occupied space could be heated with hot water in the winter and could rely on the hot water for their hot water heating. The datacenter gets a lot cheaper cooling bill. It'd effectively be geothermal cooling on steroids.
- iNerdier 3y agoOne could also use is rurally to heat greenhouses for crops that need warmer climates. Apparently there is one company using their data centre to heat (a?) swimming pool in the UK however!
- creer 3y agoAnd aluminum production near hydroelectricity (all the way to the beginning of hydroelectricity in narrow valleys in the french Alps) and heavy water in Norway (hydro), and currently aluminum in Iceland (geothermal) and ... well ... same in Saudi Arabia et al (natural gas to electricity to aluminum - still more effective than shipping the gas it seems). Aluminum is easier to ship than electricity. What's interesting is that there are more constraints today: Can a deal be made for consistent and low prices in the long run? The data center "unit" these days is pretty large - is there enough power? Is it available 24/7 (problem for wind: a data center can soak up when nearby wind power is cheap but it still has to get predictable power for the rest). A new progress is that location mattered perhaps for most data center: legal and latency. But for "pure compute" in AI tasks, it may matter a lot less: latency might not matter if the process will churm for days. So perhaps Iceland has some data centers in its future - no need to export the aluminum. There are other weird things about pricing vs exports: California exporting water in the form of almonds. And rice.
- westurner 3y agoTo push waste heat to a building across the street, it's usually necessary to add heat at the source n order to more efficiently transfer the thermal energy to the receiver. OTOH other synergies that require planning and/or zoning: - Algae plants can capture waste CO2. - Datacenters produce steam-sterilized water that's usually tragically not fed back into water treatment. - Smokestacks produce CO2, Nitrogen, and other flue gases that are reusable by facilities like Copenhill and probably for production of graphene or similar smokestack air filters.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe link in the article doesn't provide any evidence of the steel mill vs data center claim. I'll be charitable and assume that he got his links mixed up because he's got the same target URL for two links. But anyway... I don't think we need many more steel mills. Most steel production is actually the recycling of old steel. We are very close to being in a steady-state loop with regards to steel. So you need to find other uses for cheap power ;)
- Gibbon1 3y agoI think reprocessing scrap steel is a really good candidate for solar. Capitalization costs are low enough it's worth it to chase the lowest priced electricity. Doesn't matter if the lowest cost is at night or during the day. Solar is probably better because the marginal cost is close to zero. meaning if you're buying electricity at night from a nat gas plant the plant still has to burn natural gas to supply you power. But you buying excess capacity from a solar farm doesn't cost the solar farm anything.
- kristianp 3y ago> Intel recently released a new generation of chips with significantly improved performance per watt that doesn't have much better absolute performance than the previous generation. When was this published? I can't see a date. The Intel reference seems old, this stuff is still relevant today though. Also no mention of all those GPUs used for AI LLMs of late.