I don’t know who Kevin is, so I looked at his Wikipedia page and I’m still none the wiser what he’s actually done to “earn” all that money. Looks like a serial grifter.
Wanker from Shark tank. Should have been named Wank Tank.
Kevin is a POS and I really doubt this DataCenter will ever be built. Having said that, this article is also full of fearmongering trash.
”Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.”
this article is also full of fearmongering trash.
”Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.”
I work in the O&G industry. “Heat islands” are a legitimate concern for both refineries and power plants. Failure to limit the heat emissions in a given area can require personal to wear more protective gear just to get inside the facilities. Alternatively, you have to shut parts of the plant down to get people safely into and out of it for maintenance.
It absolutely has an impact on the surrounding ecology. And you can see the brownfields that certain decommissioned sites create, stretching for miles in every direction.
For a state like Utah, with a relatively low per-capita population and some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, rolling out a bunch of industrial facilities to suck up the potable water and blast the area with vented coolant would have a very real and noticeable impact.
The problem is that we’ve done this cycle of development and decimation so many times in our industrial era that “doing what we’ve always done” gets written off as fear-mongering, because we no longer recognize the impact.
That’s why it will be built. RIP Utah
You may want to start taking this shit seriously because this type of casual acceptance is exactly what these capitalists are hoping for.
If this “fear-mongering” helps push for better climate policy, there is no downside, as acting when we don’t need to is better than not acting when we fucking should be.
Well heat islands are a real thing. If you put 9GW of energy into a data center and dont want to fry the electronics you have to expel that heat somewhere.
Data centers often expel their heat into the surrounding ecology via air con and liquid cooling.
This is selling fear because this data center won’t obey the laws of thermodynamics?
They should really try boiling some water with that waste heat, maybe make it spin a turbine or two.
Don’t give them ideas, otherwise O’Leary will start charging the locals a ‘Luxury Geothermal Subscription’ just to stand near the exhaust vent.
“neothermal”
I’m not sure we have ways of concentrating energy enough to do this. Heat pumps let us move heat, but I’m not aware of anything that can get the target to 100+ degrees Celsius.
Put a big ass sterling engine on the roof. But really, the level of waste heat involved does seems to beg for a system if these are going to be putting out that much.
They should try moving to a place with fresh water and stop draining a pool of salt, if they have to generate this heat for fucking useful reason.
But at least when I have to write a professional sounding email I can shut off my brain and make the computer cluster do it!
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but shouldn’t something generating the heat of several atom bombs be utilized as a heat source for making energy, instead of energy used to cool it?
I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.
It’s really difficult to recuperate waste heat spread across such a large space in a way that doesn’t compromise on cooling effectiveness.
This is never getting built
Look at what happened in Saudi’s Neom.
They kicked a bunch of locals off the property, diverted a bunch of local waterways, dropped millions of tons of concrete onto a foundation, and then ran out of money, gave up, and walked away.
You got all horror of industrial terraforming but none of the promised payout.
“When I think about what’s going to lead to intergenerational prosperity in Utah, it is not a data center, it’s the beautify of our landscapes”
This is what’s going to kill us as a species. Because a data center doesn’t do anything. Nothing worth this horrific environmental damage.
At every turn, there’s another terrible consequence to wildlife, more pollution… when did we forget we are animals, too?
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could invent some kind of technology to distribute the compute so it wasn’t so terrifyingly concentrated /s
intergenerational prosperity
If I know my rich sociopath talk, this means “generations of MY descendants being old money rich and saluting the giant portrait of ME over their comically large fireplaces.”
How much in terms of bear farts per cubic nautical mile is that?
I propose a hyperscale billionaire cooking center where we drive the heat of 23 atom bombs directly up Kevin’s ass.
They’re not being built, and you know they’re not because of exactly these kind of figures. They’d need multiple additional power stations to feed them. The kinds of places that cost governments tens of billions.
Then all that energy needs to go somewhere so you probably need to add 25% more to power a cooling system. Something that can dissipate that atom bomb of energy into the environment every hour.
Without the support infrastructure the compute is useless, and nobody is talking about the infrastructure because it’s impossible.
Decades of protests and innovation to stop climate change
VS
one AI techbro
Poof! Progress gone, just like that
that is because protesting just raises the awareness of the issue. Its better than nothing, but only direct action has any effect on anything at this point. The billionaires should be considered to be akin to foreign occupation and resisted accordingly.
There’s actually need for this or they just want to fuck the environment to scam some investors?
Look at Elon musk’s gigashit, it’s a tenth of this size and because it was underused he was forced to rent it to the competition (anthropic) to pay the bills.
Americans will just outsource this environmental costs to someone else and call it a day.
Carbon offset credits. You just buy them and then the CO2 goes away because someone else will plant a tree probably somewhere. /s
Nono, someone else will pay someone elser to not cut down a tree that already exists. Then a few weeks later that someone elser will ‘decide’ to cut down that tree after all so someone else can pay them to not cut down the same tree again. On paper this counts as 2 whole trees being magically generated.
I can’t wait to eat Kevin.
I’m fine with just cooking him and throwing the meat away
we got a datacenter just for cooking flesh.
When I was in Florida once I was reliably informed that the alligator in the nearby swamp was called Kevin. This was about 10 years ago and I don’t know how long crocodiles live but if Kevin the crocodile is still alive maybe he would appreciate Kevin the billionaire
And all that for some shitty pngs and the pleasure of not being attended by actual people.
