> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air
Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!”
Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.
Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).
In the most nuclear country, France, power plants can't rise the river temperature by too much legally and yes it is an issue in summer with less water flowing.
Waste heat is a problem for cities, why not a large DC?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
Even the largest DC doesn't have anywhere near the waste heat of a city.
One of the larger DCs is 7.65 GW on 8000 acres in Texas. It will radiate around 236.3 W/m^2 (compare vs 1000 W/m^2 solar irradiation). This emission continues 24/7/365, while the sun doesn't. So yes, the UHI is real.
That plus all the gas turbines powering it which release many tons of gasses.
And finally all the infrasound from the DC and its generators have impacts on humans and all creatures for many miles away.
Oh and the water consumption.
> One of the larger DCs is 7.65 GW
"is" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The data centre doesn't exist.
Yes. The hot water the datacenters dump destroys local ecosystems.
Citation?
https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...
Why would a citation be needed?
Because we want to understand what impact it is?
Residential house emit heat too, but - most of the time - we don't consider them "destroys local ecosystems".. Maybe they do, but we don't treat them as a boolean thing, we try to understand the impact...
> Residential house emit heat too
You are missing the context of the ecosystem - the topic is water ways. Homes aren't raising the temperature of local waterways which can wipe out entire fish and other aquatic populations while encouraging growth of oxygen depleting organisms and algae. Instead of a river or stream you have a dead stinking waterway.
> You are missing the context of the ecosystem
That's one of several reasons why a citation is warranted.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, TFA is talking about a closed loop system and uses a coolant mix, so yeah I think a citation is needed.
I guess parent means the heat has to somewhere, closed system or not.
Some nuclear power plants use rivers and lakes, that’s bad for their ecosystems if it’s too much but this system uses dry coolers so the extra heat should be negligible
It goes to space like all the other heat does otherwise we'd be living on a ball of gently rotating lava.
The question is, where does it go before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
Do you also demand a citation when someone says dogs have four legs instead of realizing you know nothing about the subject at hand and quietly looking it up yourself, and then maybe asking more questions?
The burden on proof should be on "dumping hot water to a river doesn't damage its ecosystem" rather than the opposite...
That’s not what they are doing
> capture heat directly at the source and transport it to outdoor dry coolers, essentially large radiator coils positioned outside the building.
The heat goes into the air
The correct place to bring that up is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672306
Dumping hot water into rivers harms ecosystems regardless of whether anyone happens to do it right now, and asking for a citation for that is such a WTF in and of itself we really shouldn't gloss over it.
>The heat goes into the air
Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.
Never really like this because it feels some arbitrary as to what counts as making a claim. Human language is filled with implications, and those implications are filled with implied claims. Yet burden or proof seems mostly used when someone makes one of those implied claims explicit, say by explicitly rejecting one.
"We should do X."
"X is not possible."
There was an implied claim that X is possible and an explicit claim that X is not possible, but often it feels that in such a scenario, it is the second individual who is deemed having a burden of proof.
This is made all the worse that there is rarely a single implied claim, but more a group of related implied claims that are also weighted. Like some combination of "data centers don't destroy the environment" and "or maybe they do, but only in amounts of destruction that are tolerable compared to human behaviors and worth the outputs gained" and even "they modify the environment, but it doesn't count as destruction, just change". And even worse (yet again), different readers of the conversation will find themselves placing different weights on these different interpretations making it near impossible to agree on what the original claim is. Thus the first person who makes an explicit claim gets all the attention which ignores all the messy implied human communications preceding it.
Actually yeah, data centers using evaporative cooling shouldn't be causing more waste heat problems than most types of heavy industry. Heck, I would guess that even if datacenters dumping hot water on rivers it shouldn't have much of an impact unless the river is very small.
Shouldn't spread misinformation when there are plenty of other valid points about datacenters.
There aren't many heavy industries that dissipate 100MW of thermal energy, never mind a GW.
Those that do - power generating facilities, large smelters, etc. - have very significant environmental footprints.
>I would guess that even if datacenters dumping hot water on rivers it shouldn't have much of an impact unless the river is very small.
That's the extraordinary claim. That is what should need citation, not the other way around.
That's interesting...I don't think I've seen the data to support this
Probably not an accident; see Kim. Data Center Cooling Water Discharge: Assessing Environmental Transparency and Information Gaps, 32 Hastings Envt'l L.J. 177 (2026)
But the work is out there, for instance Miara et al. Thermal pollution impacts on rivers and power supply in the Mississippi River watershed, Environ. Res. Lett. 13 034033 (2018)
Worthington et al. The effects of a thermal discharge on the macroinvertebrate community of a large British river: implications for climate change. Hydrobiologia 753, 81–95 (2015)
Lukšienė, Sandström, Lounasheimo, and Andersson. The effects of thermal effluent exposure on the gametogenesis of female fish. Journal of Fish Biology, 56: 37-50 (2000)
Penk and Williams. Thermal Effluents from Power Plants Boost Performance of the Invasive Clam Corbicula Fluminea in Ireland's Largest River. Science of The Total Environment, vol. 693 (2019)
Mmm yeah...just straight releasing the water isn't ideal. But of course, it's free! And that's what society optimizes for, sadly.
I’d love that heat in the winter. Imagine, free heat! Linus heats his pool with excess cpu heat. It’s all about using things wisely and not panicking. AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them, but you can leverage their waste for profit.
> AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them,
Maybe you can't (or don't want to), but people can absolutely fight data center construction. Your lack of imagination doesn't bind others.
Have you read Don Quixote?
But why? I want cheap tokens. Build a data center on every block (or more realistically in all the empty space we have everywhere).
Unironic Paperclip Maximalism. Huh.
I propose that you don’t actually want cheap tokens. You want cheap tokens in service of some other goals. Are they worth the environmental cost?
dyauspitr, please respond. I'm trying to contact you about building a data center next to your home, or in your basement, or in your closet. I'll set it up for you. Please respond.
So start building. Too lazy?
Your backyard first.
>AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them
Sounds more like a threat than something desired
They were banned in my country through a democratic process.
Ofcourse it is easier when they are all owned by foreign companies lol. If they actually made money and provided jobs (lmao) it might be different.
I'm not sure which country that is, but it would have to be on a different planet! No country on Earth has banned data centers.
Which country? Did they also ban AI use to be coherent?
I don't see why it would be incoherent to ban datacenters but not AI use.
If you don't fight data centers, data centers won't seek solution oriented ways to lower their footprint. You are really saying that you can't fight data center demand. And that is true, but you can restrain their supply, increase their cost, and optimize on low impact approaches.
> If you don't fight data centers, data centers won't seek solution oriented ways to lower their footprint. You are really saying that you can't fight data center demand. And that is true, but you can restrain their supply, increase their cost, and optimize on low impact approaches.
Not that this is an apples to apples comparison but imagine people saying that about nuclear reactors. Yes, we want them to be as safe as possible and as efficient as possible but that doesn't mean we don't build it. And at the risk of being a NIMBY, AI data centers don't have to be located right next to my house. Unlike regular data centers, these can and should be in the frigid cold. That would probably be for the best anyway. All it needs is redundant fiber network connection, right? Also we should probably require all AI data centers to use renewable energy only. All these are doable but the fight against AI data centers has to be practical and solutions oriented, not fighting it for the sake of fighting it.
Nuclear and datacenter comparisons aren't the apples to apples type you're so fond of.
Any safety measure that requires the humans to do the right procedures the right way for 10^5 years is not safety.
Then ask for legislation that they have to be powered by solar power+batteries or something
Simple community objections should be sufficient to legislate change. Right now we see pride and ignorance from data centers to community concerns.
Yep. Google does this in Finland for the Hamina datacenter: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
"Everyone will be living in the metaverse by 2025, you can't fight it so might as well buy virtual property near Snoop Dogg"
It takes one recesssion and all datacenter spending will get rolled back. Yes technology will not go away, AI has been here for over many decades that doesn't mean the current paradigm will continue always and exactly the same forever into the future. If history shows us anything its that paradigms change
These opinions are hilarious.
Yeah man, we have had AI like this forever, nothing to see here! Data center usage going to zero!
Galaxy brain stuff.
Meanwhile, we literally cannot build fast enough, and are nowhere near saturation.
I wonder why dark fiber was so cheap in the early 2000s when google famously started using it to link their datacenters?
Not to mention that a huge percentage of the fiber laid in the 90s was never used. It was put in the wrong place or turned out to be the wrong type or was just lost when the "the internet is the future and will change everything. it runs over fiber and we'll need so much more than we could ever lay" companies went bust.
article also says:
"The geography caveat matters. A data center in the Scottish Highlands and one in Phoenix, Arizona, face very different realities. But even in warmer climates, the shift toward 45-degrees-Celsius coolant moves operators significantly closer to that chiller-less ideal — where chillers may turn on just a few days a year when the outside air temperature demands it."
Maybe, that's why they want Greenland so bad. Low temperature, many free spaces, no significant nature and if there is one, not enough citizen who can complain. And if they still need water for cooling, there is probably enough from the melting ice they can use.
1. Who is "they"?
2. Alaska has all of those things. (Though there's plenty of "significant nature" in both Greenland and Alaska.)
All the money they save on water cooling will be spent on massive undersea fiber lines to move the data to and from the island.
Those are fairly cheap, hyperscalers have been building more or less their own cables for many years, they cost practically nothing compared to the data centers themselves.
https://resources.telegeography.com/telegeography-content-pr...
Yeah, what we really need is space data centres so we can beam off the data into space instead.
Ah yes but you can shunt the costs of that off into a public works/ taxpayer funded infrastructure project
The vast, vast majority of submarine cable projects are paid for with private money. I'm only aware of a few in the US that have received any public grants (all connecting relatively unprofitable areas like Hawaii, kind of analogous to the Essential Air Service program).
No, datacenters are placed near cities because the biggest concern is workforce.
How much workforce do you think it takes to run a data center?
I'd say that in cooler countries, warm water could be very useful, e.g. for heating houses.
You can’t beat thermodynamics no matter how hard you try.
This shouldn’t be a surprised to the majority of people.
Can't beat thermodynamics - there's no free lunch there.
With LLM latencies, you won't notice it much.
Classic "solve one problem, create another" move. At least they are honest about the tradeoffs I guess.
Waste heat into the atmosphere is hardly pollution. I think you don’t understand the scales involved
Canada is building a ton of datacenters with this built in.
It's not a sleight of hand.
Datacenter locations mainly optimize power, cooling, and fibre.
Cooling is not the same everywhere, even the US has places that are cool enough to not need evaporative cooling water use.
Waste heat from these things is negligible compared to the sun heat. I know people love to hate on these things, but come on...
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Well you know, data centers are optional. The sun is not.
What a disingenuous comparison, do you hear yourself?
Comments on the internet are also optional, yet you do it
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Not sure it was a disingenuous comparison. If they’re saying the heat from a DC is drop in the bucket provided by the sun (in a given area), then that heat would indeed be negligible. On the other hand, if that heat comes in water form, and upsets the ecosystem (in a given area), then that would be NOT negligible. Not really about optionality in either case.
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To be fair to Nvidia, they are not the first person to dump their waste heat to a Tmin environment. There's a reason most power plants are near bodies of water.
Wouldn't building in the far North be easier than Space? At least better than the desert like Arizona?
Trust me. In the depths of a northern winter, nobody will complain about "waste heat". Just ask the manetees that huddle near reactor outflows in florida.
We'll complain if it gives us an allergy to steak.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/06/as-lone-star-tick...
Or malaria.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03476-7
But maybe we want northern winters to stay... northern winters?
On an unrelated note, there are so many em dashes in this article I have to wonder if there was any human involved in the process at all. They could've at least signed Nemotron underneath as to not to offend reality.
Have you stopped for a second to consider the utter mathematical absurdity of what you’re suggesting here?
It is impossible for a datacenter to meaningfully heat more than the air in its immediate vicinity.
It’s anti AI, so people would actually believe the data centers are going to singlehandly melt the icecaps
Well I mean not from the waste heat but they have expectations of GigaWatts of new sustained power because they always want to run. The US has on order of 1-2 Tera watts of power capacity so you are talking about .1% of the grid power if a hyperscalar datacenter takes 1 gig of power. I've seen projections of need 50-100 new gigs of capacity. We will see if that actually happens but if it does we are talk 5% increase in grid loading. It sounds small but that is a tremendous about of power.
I mean there are a lot of solutions to making more power or making more efficient chips but to trivialize the impacts of AI as anti Ai propaganda which is how this comment comes of its a bit propaganda minded itself. I think backlash to AI is direct result of strawmaninh Anti AI as having only deranged opinions and anti progress. Where the datacenters are located people suffer because of high velocity don't care about consequences thinking. Every industry has to planing around people or people will do something crazy like burn the centers or try and nationalize data centers. I definitely think that would be stupid but don't underestimate stupid
nothing wrong with nationalizing
Silence! Do not let fact and reason stop the woke or anti-AI agenda! Only emotions count in this space!
Woke != anti-ai. Separate ideas. I’m pro AI and would be considered woke, which I would not use pejoratively.
This has also one of the arguments against AC in France, shame on you for wanting to moving the hot air from inside to outside.
It’s pretty incredible, especially given that the free education in France is actually rather decent.
A few AC is one thing.
Many AC in a limited space covered in concrete with almost zero tree in the area is another thing.
We need to be more specific about what we are talking about.
Anyway ACs are not enough in a city. ideally you also want streets with a significant amount of trees and greenery so that there is significant shade and heat from sunlight doesn't radiate too much from concrete/pavement.
Well, you can wait for greenery to be planted and grow around houses. It'll take 10-20 years. Or you can wait for your landlord to install the shutters (will never happen). Alternatively, you can get a portable inefficient AC and save yourself from 40 degree heat in a rooftop apartment. The mental toll of sweating 24/7 for months is just too big to theorize about the best way to combat global warming.
France is not under threat from this.
They're also missing the winter bit, where an AC heatpump needs three ou four times less energy than a resistive heater ... oh well.