9GW datacentre approved.
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek my hope is none of this dumb shit ever gets built and the bubble bursts well before that.
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"Water for the Las Vegas valley is piped from the bottom of Lake Mead, through what is known as “the third straw.” The Southern Nevada Water Authority built that pipe at a cost of around $1.5 billion, and it is the only pipe operating now. The two others are no longer below the lake’s surface.
The Colorado River supplies 90% of the water for Southern Nevada, and provides water for 40 million people on its course to the Mexican border and out to the Gulf of California."
Water woes: Colorado River getting less snow, sending projections for Lake Mead lower
Forecasts keep going from bad to worse for water in the West, and a new report released Friday brought more bad news for the outlook at Lake Mead.
KLAS (www.8newsnow.com)
As long as the policy is "do not use water in any way" then I agree with that article!
@mycotropic @quixoticgeek you could make it policy that it has to rain every day
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"Water for the Las Vegas valley is piped from the bottom of Lake Mead, through what is known as “the third straw.” The Southern Nevada Water Authority built that pipe at a cost of around $1.5 billion, and it is the only pipe operating now. The two others are no longer below the lake’s surface.
The Colorado River supplies 90% of the water for Southern Nevada, and provides water for 40 million people on its course to the Mexican border and out to the Gulf of California."
Water woes: Colorado River getting less snow, sending projections for Lake Mead lower
Forecasts keep going from bad to worse for water in the West, and a new report released Friday brought more bad news for the outlook at Lake Mead.
KLAS (www.8newsnow.com)
As long as the policy is "do not use water in any way" then I agree with that article!
That's why the Colorado river never makes it as far as the sea. The whole river gets stolen.
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@quixoticgeek how is it going to change weather patterns? It certainly might, I guess, but are there any simulations of this that you know of?
@iwein well evaporative cooling puts a shit ton of moisture in the atmosphere.
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
9GW of datacenter... how many Unix shell accounts, UseNet News servers, Nginx web servers, is that? Will that serve a trillion times the number of people on this planet? Does this mean I can download my favorite Linux distribution faster?
Wow...
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek I wonder how that salt dust will do to the servers when blowing off the dry lake bed after they kill it?
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@iwein well evaporative cooling puts a shit ton of moisture in the atmosphere.
@quixoticgeek yes, and significant heat, so possibly extra rain locally?
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@peteriskrisjanis @freya @quixoticgeek This was my immediate reaction. Almost none of these projects are actually building anything - it's all an imitation of growth on paper.
I miss when these companies made things.
Also on behalf of Canada I apologize for Kevin O'Leary, although he has tried his best to distance himself from us for decades.
@lovemakeshare @peteriskrisjanis @freya @quixoticgeek that fucking piece of fuck
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@quixoticgeek @CppGuy they can fill floats with natural gas and extend the road over the sea.
@moopet @quixoticgeek @CppGuy still a better idea than data centers in orbit
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek That bubble can't burst soon enough.
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@quixoticgeek But if it's in a desert it's using locally produced solar power with zero emissions, isn't it?
@TimWardCam @quixoticgeek
Of course not. If you read the article, it's going to be using some kind of natural gas powered generation, "At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon." -
@ehproque dunno. I'm scared of the answer.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few months back, suggesting that 1GW is enough to evaporate 33 megalitres of water per day. Obviously, at 9GW, you're looking at nine times that. That number is obscenely, meaninglessly large, so picture a cube measuring 42m × 42m × 42m, fill it to the brim with room-temperature water, and then boil it all off in one day. That's the same volume as a decent-sized tower block.
Where are they going to find 300 megalitres a day in the desert? How long can they keep that up? How large are the aquifers they're depleting? What effect will it have on the stability of the ground they're building on? When they dump that much water and heat into the atmosphere every day, what effect will it have on the local climate? What effect will it have when the #AI bubble bursts and they stop doing it?
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@TimWardCam @quixoticgeek
Of course not. If you read the article, it's going to be using some kind of natural gas powered generation, "At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon."@TimWardCam @quixoticgeek
I don't know if the AI boom was designed specifically to justify building a bunch more fossil fuel powered generating capacity, but that sure looks like it's an effect. It stinks, because building a ton of renewable power would be a nice consolation prize for the AI boom collapsing. -
@lovemakeshare @peteriskrisjanis @freya @quixoticgeek that fucking piece of fuck
@jpaskaruk @peteriskrisjanis @freya @quixoticgeek Not the *specific* words I would have used, but yes.
Did you know he acquired and killed The Learning Company so hard it almost took down Mattel? And maybe took the whole edutainment software industry with it? 'member that? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few months back, suggesting that 1GW is enough to evaporate 33 megalitres of water per day. Obviously, at 9GW, you're looking at nine times that. That number is obscenely, meaninglessly large, so picture a cube measuring 42m × 42m × 42m, fill it to the brim with room-temperature water, and then boil it all off in one day. That's the same volume as a decent-sized tower block.
Where are they going to find 300 megalitres a day in the desert? How long can they keep that up? How large are the aquifers they're depleting? What effect will it have on the stability of the ground they're building on? When they dump that much water and heat into the atmosphere every day, what effect will it have on the local climate? What effect will it have when the #AI bubble bursts and they stop doing it?
@CppGuy @quixoticgeek where did they find the water to make a city in the desert?
️ They'll bring it from elsewhere. And what will the people of elsewhere drink? Brawndo! What your body craves! -
9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek According to Wikipedia: “In 2024, Utah had a total summer capacity of 10.3 GW through all of its power plants”
So it’s going to basically use the equivalent of all the power generated in Utah
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek
Did you also note the proposed site is served by one 2 lane road? Back when they were building the natural gas pipeline, the one 6 room motel in the area was pretty busy. All other workers had to drive about 1½ hours from any sort of accommodation. -
9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek may not even get built lol.
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@TimWardCam @quixoticgeek
I don't know if the AI boom was designed specifically to justify building a bunch more fossil fuel powered generating capacity, but that sure looks like it's an effect. It stinks, because building a ton of renewable power would be a nice consolation prize for the AI boom collapsing.@VATVSLPR @TimWardCam @quixoticgeek It's who's funding it.
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@quixoticgeek how much water then? Where's it coming from?
@ehproque @quixoticgeek
They claim they will pump groundwater, purify it because it is too salty as is, then send the hot water to the Great Salt Lake. This site is a long ways from the Colorado River.
There is ample area out the covered only in salt grass to install enough solar power including batteries for nights and cloudy days to power the entire united states, let alone some data centers.
