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?
It’s really difficult to recuperate waste heat spread across such a large space in a way that doesn’t compromise on cooling effectiveness.
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.
deleted by creator
“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.”
Oh burning more fuel, you having a laugh mare?
Seriously anyone who thinks more carbon in the atmosphere is going to help may as well be in the loony bin.
Also sorry as a Canadian this idiot got vaulted to the world stage. He’s a moron as far as I can tell.
I’m just nobody though,but who can understand impact of climate change and the harm we’re doing to our world. So piss off with that idea until it produces a way to run without impacting our environment. If somehow you can then hats off to ya, I’d say I’d eat my hat but I really don’t want to and I’m a man of my word.
Mean I’d like to say worse and don’t expect anything but if somehow it can be better than thank them all. If not, fuck off for the advertisement I’ve seen enough commercials.
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.
An “atom bomb” is not a standard unit of measurement. It’s less than helpful.
Americans will use anything but the metric system.
Pffft. An ‘atom bomb’ as a unit of measurement is (roughly) equal to:
ff x (hdl/afps) x solh x ambWhere:
ff = football fields
hdl = hot dog lengths
afps = average Floridian pants size
solh = Statues of Liberty heights
amb = average medical bill.Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
How many atom bombs less than helpful is it?
5
Yes but at that level of energy no unit is useful for the average person to comprehend. I somewhat understand the usage here. If it was in joules very few people would be able comprehend.
But then why pick 23, a number with two significant digits, to indicate scale? By this logic, 10 would be as effective at communication.
The 9 GW are already there if anyone needs a proper value, but without anything to compare it to, 9GW means nothing to most people. Hence the comparison.
9 is not the total energy. The article says the total thermal load is 16. 9 for the electrical usage and another 7-8 in the form of cooling. It also says that’s the amount of 40,000 Walmart Supercenters…if you want another non standard American unit of measurement
If you want a standard unit of measurement, I trust you can re-read the title and find “9GW” in there. That is a proper standard unit, but to most people a number so mindbogglingly huge makes no sense at all, so they added a comparison to something people are more likely to being able to even roughly conceptualize.
That 9gw is not the whole amount. the total thermal load is 16GW.
Which according to the pdf is equal to 40,000 Walmart supercenters if someone needs a non standard, American unit of measurement…
Thats enough power to send Doc and Marty on 14 and half trips through time.
that’s probably why they put an actual value in the title preceding it
Nuke bad. Propaganda
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.
I just started having random shark tank clips appear on my YouTube and totally unsurprised this dude is pos, stank vibe since the very first episode.
absolute and utter piece of shit, killed somebody a few years ago drunk-driving his boat, then made his wife take the rap for him…
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.
they’re rich, they’ll just buy themselves a new environment
How much in terms of bear farts per cubic nautical mile is that?
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.
Only if we can strap him to the heat sinks. 🍽️
generate the waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day.
Americans will do anything but use the metric system.
Listen guy, maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have some serious fuckery we are trying to deal with here. While I agree that metric is a more logical system. We’re trying to get a grip while everything around us is crumbling. Switching to metric is in like volume 17 of our todo list right now, sandwiched between end daylight savings time and making the my pillow guy eat a sock.
Who’s this ‘we’ you’re speaking for. Do you have a frog in your pocket?
Sounds like he’s talking about Americans. I don’t think “frog personhood” has been established there at this time, unless one owns a corporation.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Is that a realistic Approximation of energy usage? This seems a lot to me, even over the span of one day
Definitely off by a few orders of magnitude.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
17gw of heat is both under and over estimate.
3,600 of those industrial-scale generators to power Stratos
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Does “9GW data center” not mean “a data center that consumes 9GW of power”?
Or is it “9GW of computers + 5GW of cooling + something”?9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
its 9gw of consumption. 19gw of total heat generation.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
9GW is first. That’s metric. The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
Yeah, who doesn’t know the heat of an atom bomb? (which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude)
Well, everyone knows it’s at least a lot. That’s the point. Most people don’t know what 9GW means, in terms of heat. Even a small nuclear bomb it’s enough to vaporized a large area. This tells even the least informed person that it’s an amount of energy that should be concerning.
which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude
That’s why “Hiroshima” is now a unit. We’re lucky “Tsar Bomba” isn’t.
but first is peak power, not waste energy, we’re still missing the SI estimated number of Wh wasted per day
True, yeah. It should be Wh, not just Watts. I think most data centers are designed to run 24/7 though, so the Wh might be close to the same as peak.
If they can tell us how many “atom bombs” per day it takes to power it, at least we could figure it out!
The other number is to give an estimate that is more relatable.
I still don’t quite understand. Can I get a conversion into how many hotdogs the heat could cook?
Let’s assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:
q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.
The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:
9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second
With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.
342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds
Converting this to minutes:
890/60=14.8 minutes
So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.
Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K
So the specific heat of water at those temperatures is 4184 J/kg K, and those food court hot dogs are probably about the same as Kirkland dinner franks, which have about 73g of water, 31 g of fat (specific heat of about 2300 J/ kg K), 16g of protein (1500 J/kg K), and 3g of sugars/carbs (1200 J/kg K), and let’s say negligible ash, so we’re left with a weighted average of about 3280 J/kg K.
That’s within 10% of your assumed value, so I think I just wasted my time trying to check your assumption, which was pretty close to my number that took a lot more work.
Finally someone speaking english.
The math you just did terrifies me and I have no way of verifying it, so I’ll just say good job and leave it at that.
I think it’s also important to have a hotdogs per day figure, and the math from here is super simple, so I can do it.
384,1236060*24 = 33,188,227,200 hot dogs per day.
Well, there you go, free lunch for every schoolkid. Silver lining.
So if she weighs the same as a duck… then she’s made of wood…
and therefore…
A WITCH!! BURN HER!!
More than two
“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”
“So…seven hot dogs a day.”
Depends how well done you like them.
A lot
I wonder how many football fields long this thing is?
Well… It’s 9GW of waste heat. Same as the energy supply.
No, 9GW of electricity, and they claim 16GW total. With a greater than 50% efficient gas plant.
Probably like 8GW of waste heat, and 1GW of infrasound
Ok, but that will still need to be handled otherwise it’ll shake the building to it’s knees.
They just pump it outside of the environment
…into another environment?
No, outside of the environment.
There’s nothing out there but birds, (poor)people and 1 gigawatt of infrasound.
This is USica, it doesn’t matter where you’re pumping it, just that it’s out of where you’re pumping it from. Doesn’t really even matter what you’re pumping, USians gotta pump something.
Don’t know if you’re trying an obscure reference to the shadoks, an absurd french tv cartoon from 1968
How many is that, in bananas? Or school buses?
Sometimes you have to cater to the lowest common denominator (the AI booster).
I propose a hyperscale billionaire cooking center where we drive the heat of 23 atom bombs directly up Kevin’s ass.
He’s no where near a billionaire.
They should really try boiling some water with that waste heat, maybe make it spin a turbine or two.
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 in a desert for no fucking useful reason.
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 say we nuke it from orbit then.
