On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.
On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.
Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect. This was never in dispute.
But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.
they just want data centers now. most companies would rather use solar, but they can't on short timelines due to land use regulations (and import tariffs)
And if they put them in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why there's a problem.
What I don't understand is putting these things in populated areas.
Would you like to work in the middle of nowhere?
After construction, not all that many people work at a data center. Some ops staff, maybe a small security team.
So let's spit on those 'not so many people' from our ivory tower?
Besides, it's not about people, it's about power. Pulling a few MW into middle of nowhere is prohibitively expensive.
30 minutes outside of the suburbs doesn't sound like an awful commute.
If they can be deployed in low-earth orbit with nobody working on them, they can be deployed 20 miles east of Bumfuck, Nebraska with nobody working on them.
The physical threat model of the Nebraska option does not rely on the tyranny of the rocket to keep intruders away.