CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@luna now I want a gif of Columbo saying "... but the future refused to change"

@mdione Most (probably all) DCs will use *a* closed loop where they circulate coolant (probably water, maybe mixed with glycol) to get heat out of the room (or directly off the chips). From there, many use systems that consume water to get that heat out into the environment. It's relatively new that large datacenters are trying to use entirely waterless systems on that side

@wiersdorf This is a good question, so I looked up some numbers.

Two different sources get me something like 3 acre-feet of water per acre for alfalfa in that area: a 1994 report from Utah State: https://waterrights.utah.gov/docSys/v912/a912/a912044e.pdf (see SNWV in Figure 2), and a listing of a huge farm for sale in the Snowville area now: https://www.land.com/property/6034-acres-in-box-elder-county-utah/4545825/ - claims 3895 acres under irrigation using 11.7k acre-feet of water rights.

So that would mean that the Stratus project has secured enough water rights to farm about 4.3k acres of alfalfa (which is about 10% of the land they say they have access to).

So: this is not nearly enough water to farm all of that area with alfalfa (is all of it even suitable for this purpose? no idea), but enough for a big chunk of it.

Of course, Utah is already watering vastly more alfalfa than we can afford to with our limited water resources.

@jonhendry @Dougfir The developer claims 2,000 workers on site after construction, a number that seems overly optimistic

@richardinsandy my collection of spherical objects is clearly visible, dunno what that says about what's in my head

@katrinakatrinka

I don't know the exact level of purity they go for, but yeah, removing things that could leave mineral deposits or cause corrosion is important

It is often mixed with glycol to lower the freezing point (no idea what Stratos would do, they have given us nowhere near that level of detail)

@iris a whole lot of surveillance capitalism, I guess

I was on the local news about this, lol my office is such a mess

https://ksltv.com/science-technology/closed-loop-cooling-systems-save-water-but-can-be-a-drain-on-electricity/907589/

@skybrian @mjd yes, this is a possibility, and it's probably what they'd say if asked.

I'm not sure it's entirely credible though

@bnewbold yeah I dunno! In this particular campus, that building seems to have consumed all remaining space on the lot, so it *could* just be an issue of the older ones not being as space constrained, but it also could be a fundamentally different design. My assumption (based only on trends, not any special knowledge) is that this new one also takes the cooling loop all the way to the chip - I don't know what that does with optimal layouts

@briankrebs I've linked this book countless times on here and I will probably link it countless more but: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799883.html

The central thesis of the book is that when organizations build too many "accountability sinks", where no one is accountable for decisions, then those organizations eventually die.

AI is, of course, nothing if it isn't accountability sink as a service

@phairupegiont You are correct! It's generally easier to cool things down when it's colder outside! Here in northern Utah some datacenters - with far less power density than this one - are able to just use outside air to cool for a good chunk of the year. With the kinds of heat loads generated by warehouses of GPUs; well, I suspect their cooling needs are indeed lower in the winter, but they probably need active cooling all the time anyway.

There are some datacenters in Finland that even use cold seawater as part of their cooling systems!

So, why build in places that get hot part of the year? Well, if you are willing and able to use water for evaporative cooling, that's pretty effective in very dry environments - and can be cheap depending on the cost of water. Sometimes, the availability of power is a big thing too - in this case, there is an existing natural gas pipeline running through the valley that they intend to tap. For some kinds of datacenters, it's important to be near your users - though that's less important for AI training, which is what this one would likely be used for.

@gerbrandvd I don't know the exact math on this, unfortunately. What I do know though is that you'd need both solar *and* storage, in a setting like this where they're generating all of their own power on-site, they'd need to generate far more power than they need during the brightest hours of the day, then use it overnight and/or when it's overcast.

Then there's also the fact that one generates far less power from solar during the winter when the days are shorter and the angle of the sun in the sky is less favorable (and that you'd have to clear the panels of snow).

Solar might be a reasonably good match for the cooling part of the load; you can sometimes get away with using outside air when it's cool enough (winter and sometimes at night) but would be a lot harder to make work for the actual computing load, since that's going to run 24/7/365 (esp. if this is used for AI training)

@fivetonsflax I'm glad you liked it! Feel free to add anything if you want

@CiscoJunkie In this case their business address is adjacent to their datacenter. But yeah I don't see why they'd have it anywhere else, they have a datacenter and it's in a fairly fiber-rich area

@Dougfir yep, it seems extremely unlikely, and I'm not inclined to take the word of another guy who plays a businessman on TV

@lpryszcz Yep, even if you are energy-efficient at shedding heat, you are still shedding heat!

‘So much worse than I even thought’: Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create massive heat island near Great Salt Lake

Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.

The Salt Lake Tribune (www.sltrib.com)

I think one of the things going on here is that the assumption is that 10x as big is "only" 10x as bad, but scales that large certainly have the possibility of qualitative changes that we might not have a good understanding of (and which we should not just take the developers' word on)

@Dougfir In county council meetings, they've claimed they are going to build some hotels for contractors and restaurants, etc. Probably on the parcel of land they got right off I-84. But they seem to expect that on-site staff (which I think they are likely overestimating to make it look more attractive) will live in Brigham City, Snowville, etc.

The area already has a similar problem with the rocket plant at Promontory point. Both my brothers did internships there, and they had to get up super early to take a company bus out there from Brigham City.

@darwinwoodka just imagine what we could do if we put these kinds of resources to other uses

@mjd Frankly, I think it's entirely implausible that it will get built as advertised. I'm not sure that the demand is actually there for as many datacenter projects as have been announced. I think it's a very good bet that many or even most of them won't get built out to the size they've discussed. I think the game here is to make big announcements to try to grab headlines and capital before someone else does, and before demand collapses. Is this one of the ones that might actually get built? No idea.

One likely pivot, if the datacenter doesn't get built, or gets built at a much smaller size, is that they switch to being a private power plant with a bunch of land where they don't have to follow state or county land-use regulations (this is what MIDA is for). That would likely mean bringing in other energy-intensive industries; they have more or less said this in county commission meetings. There's a chance that this is actually far worse, as datacenters (if they use low-water cooling) actually use less water and don't produce as much ground pollution as many industrial land uses.