Good. This whole thing was stupid when the local government and utilities keep telling us little people to conserve water because, well we’re in a 113 degree desert with a complete lack of water due to climate change and they wanted to do this bullshit.
Have you tried collecting the condensation off the glass? If you use that to wash your armpits you can go an extra day before you shower so Jeff Bezos can make numbers go up in his theoretical money.
Edit: “Comical” thought. There is less than $2.5 trillion in cash circulating.
That wouldn’t cover 20 people net worth in a country of near 350,000,000.
Why are data centers so thirsty anyway? Can’t cooling systems just reuse water in a closed loop?
They absolutely can run closed loop. It does not cool as well as evaporative cooling (it takes MASSIVE heat to evaporate water) but it can work if designed right with large system capacity and big radiators. Trouble is it’s likely more expensive than pissing away the water and we know all that matters is bottom line.
No, usually the water doesn’t cool down fast enough. Trying to reuse it just slowly heats it up, until either the water or the servers evaporate.
their servers evaporating sounds like a good deal to me
usually the water doesn’t cool down fast enough
…in the time chosen. If the planet can get down to 13c overnight, I bet Skippy’s relatively smaller data centre can get down sooner with a proper loop.
I know it’s hard finding a good spot of flat land now that the choicest spots have all been fracked for methane and are no longer stable - thanks, ‘green’ energy shysters! - but what else were ya gonna do with all that space under the solar panels?
By-product? Free showers for the homeless with that waste heat. Yay?
Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
It’s not their water, so they don’t care. When it finally runs out, they’ll just go somewhere else.
That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?
I mean, sure, that’s their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there’s no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
They’re locusts. They don’t think about anything past the next fiscal quarter.
True but this isn’t specific to the tech bubble. It’s a feature of capitalism. Competition forces firms to adopt shorter term horizons. If a firm has significant profit to make by focusing on the short term and it does not, its competitor would. If the profit possoble within this period is significant, having the competitor collect it runs the risk of the current firm failing, or the competitor accumulating enough for hostile takeover, among other failures. That would stop the current firm onwer from collecting profits in the future. Even if focusing on the long term is more profitable over time, firms may not survive in a competitive environment to realize long term profits. These are some of the fundamental processes that drive firms into short term horizons. With liquid asset markets there are even more immediate processes driving firms into short term planning.
Add to that planning based mainly on prices, which don’t capture a ton of reality and you get situations like a water hungry datacenter in the desert, cause the price of water does not capture its long term availability for example.
All of this has happened in the past, even a century ago. It’s happened and keeps happening in other industries too. For example the fossil fuel industry.
Said in another comment, our deserts are tectonically stable and free of natural disasters. If you want redundant DCs, picking one on the desert is a good bet.
Yeah, all we got is man made tragedy of the commons disasters where the data centers deplete not only the water for humans, but the water for the data centers. Poof, no more data.
I’m more worried about humans draining our aquifers that took thousands, even millions, of years to fill. That water is no more replaceable than oil.
Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
I don’t understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
Closed loop watercooling is really just air cooling with extra steps. The water is heated by the devices and cooled by a large radiator with fans. Or it’s cooled with a chiller which in turn is cooled by a radiator with fans.
Replacing the water is the most effective (yet wasteful) way to remove the heat.
To a point, yes. While you’re still using air to cool the water, I think it’s still a little more efficient than blindly keeping the server room at a low-ish temperature.
Keeping the server room cool is just using an air conditioner which is cooled by a radiator with a fan, and then using that cooled air to cool another radiator with a fan. Every step is a loss of efficiency.
The main advantage of water loops is that you get to use a different form factor for the radiator and fan by moving it away from the source of heat and aren’t limited by the case dimensions.
Because they got fuck-you money.
Amazon have how many data centers and they wanna be building more? Greedy cunts
We could simply stop using amazon services and they won’t be build anymore.
Yup, just takes a single person!
I don’t use AWS! Are all the data centers gone yet?
How do you know that this instance isn’t running on AWS?
Any link that you click on which takes you to an external website has a large probability of taking you to an AWS datacenter.
I assumed they meant “stop giving Amazon money” because “stop using the internet entirely” is a such a ridiculous suggestion
Clearly I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and checks notes change how large portions of the Internet get their compute.
I’m gonna use up all the fresh water just popping down to the data center for some AWS compute time, as a treat.
I’m sure you don’t actually understand how this functions but the reason that products aren’t really available on storefronts anymore is because they’re sold on Amazon.
We created a monster.
I have somehow avoided Amazon all these years. It’s easy for me, nothing I require is connected to Amazon.
I’m sure there are aspects of the business that I can’t avoid that I don’t even know I’m being dragged into, but I don’t spend my money with them.
Anytime I can’t find something somewhere else, I just move on and forget about it.
The only times I’ve ever been bummed about it is when I’m working on some small project and the parts are half the price on Amazon. Most recently, it was parts for an arcade machine.
If I’m being inconvenienced, I don’t even know it.
I walked away originally when they acquired cdnow.com. I last visited the site when it began redirecting to Amazon.
I’ve boycotted Amazon completely for 25 years, ever since their 1 click patent bullshit. It’s not that hard to do, but people are lazy and cheap.
I haven’t given a god damn dime to amazon since 2020, ever since I learned about the piss bottles. I’ve asked (and assisted) others to do the same. What else do you expect someone to do? Speak for yourself asshole.
Ah yes, just stop using the internet.
