Coding, Data Science, A.I., Robots |

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gtyellowjacket said:
That's a little different part of the value chain then I typically work at but this is my guess. Sometimes there is a company that owns the data center and they would rent space inside the data center. Then the AI companies like openai and Anthropic would rent that space, put in their own servers and other equipment and pay the electricity charges either to the data center operator who would pay the utility or to the electric utility directly.

For smaller companies, they are renting server time from Amazon or Google or Microsoft and a few others. That server time includes electricity charges. Its not a separate line item. Then Amazon would pay the utility for electricity.

That may be wildly inaccurate. There may be a few other middlemen in there. I can really only speak to what I do. I buy server time from Google and I also buy AI question and responses from Anthropic. The electricity is included somewhere in those charges but not separated out.
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Big companies buy the server space to. It's just easier than taking on the overhead of your own servers. My company buys a lot of space from AWS for our data lake and cloud apps.
 
mpaer said:
Thanks for sharing your experiences I have heard others
They are a menace to water supplies and power supplies
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I've read this also, but I've read it's because of how they cool the systems. From one article there are alternatives that don't kill the local water supply. I wonder why they don't utilize those more.
 
UNCatTech said:
I've read this also, but I've read it's because of how they cool the systems. From one article there are alternatives that don't kill the local water supply. I wonder why they don't utilize those more.
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It's a manufacturing capacity issue. They deploy the more environmentally friendly units when they can but they just don't make enough of them yet. So to be able to stand up these data centers to support this massive demand/anticipated demand, they deploy the old kind too. Eventually manufacturing capacity will catch up and the old ones will be switched out.

But I'm still not sure how big a deal this is for this particular town. It is right on the Mississippi. If there is anybody with abundant water resources, it's going to be them.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I've been in one. I've been in dozens. And inside they do hum on the inside but I've never heard anything coming out of them. Most of them are built in hardened structures so that weather events don't take them down which has the added benefit of deadening all the noise.
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Hardening a structure does not deaden noise. In fact, if anything it tends to do the opposite -- a hardened structure will have less damping and therefore vibrate more. Acoustics and weather-proofing are more or less separate design considerations.

Would you kindly stop misleading people or spreading false information?
 
gtyellowjacket said:
It's a manufacturing capacity issue. They deploy the more environmentally friendly units when they can but they just don't make enough of them yet. So to be able to stand up these data centers to support this massive demand/anticipated demand, they deploy the old kind too. Eventually manufacturing capacity will catch up and the old ones will be switched out.

But I'm still not sure how big a deal this is for this particular town. It is right on the Mississippi. If there is anybody with abundant water resources, it's going to be them.
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I've read that a lot use evaporative cooling, instead of a liquid cooling system. From what I've read evaporative is one of the least efficient and most water consuming.

It would seem to make sense for them to dig into the ground and use the ground temps to help, a geothermal approach. While also covering the roof with solar arrays to reduce the direct sun and produce energy.
 
UNCatTech said:
I've read that a lot use evaporative cooling, instead of a liquid cooling system. From what I've read evaporative is one of the least efficient and most water consuming.

It would seem to make sense for them to dig into the ground and use the ground temps to help, a geothermal approach. While also covering the roof with solar arrays to reduce the direct sun and produce energy.
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Evaporative cooling uses less electricity but more water. Liquid cooling uses less water but more electricity. Mechanical cooling, which is probably the ac at your house, uses no water but the most electricity. That's typically the trade-off. More water use requires less electricity and vice versa.

Liquid cooling is probably the best trade-off between electricity and water in most places but the engineering is more complex and not all systems work with liquid cooling.
 
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