3 ms·
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it. * easy permitting * lots of space
by seany 21d ago
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
- topato 21d agoWhich makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
- whall6 21d agoNew Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
- hn993302 21d agoGot an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
- SteveNuts 21d agoQTS is building a second campus in Chicago with closed loop https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop-cooling-to-eliminate-ongoing-water-use/ https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop...
- hn993302 21d agoOk, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
- nomel 21d agoThere's also a power generation water cost though! Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year. I don't know if that's significant.
- derektank 21d agoPulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
- nomel 21d agoDoes that change the math above if they're tied into the grid? If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
- derektank 21d agoIf it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
- AnthonyMouse 20d agoIt's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- fred_is_fred 21d agoNorth Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
- whall6 21d agoAgree with this. Natural gas is effectively free there. Maybe it’s the fiber connectivity that prevents them from being built? I genuinely don’t know.
- nomel 21d agoAlaska has a speed of light problem.
- fwip 21d agoDoesn't seem especially relevant for LLMs. Especially not for training, but even for inference.
- nomel 21d agoSure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
- derektank 21d agoAlaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.