Microsoft is restarting 3 mile island.
Are you for or against Data Centers?
- Thread starter ZZman
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Microsoft has one, the problem is corrosion and maintenance. You have enough of them some hardware would go bad and it is pain in the butt to lift a whole container from the ocean bottom to replace a stick of ram, then seal it up and sink it back down. We also haven't talked about powering something undersea and connecting fibers to it being a lot more expensive.
Maybe for a huge hard drive bank for archiving so you don't need a lot of IO, and the whole thing goes out after 5 years of useful life regardless, but not for AI where things get updated all the time and parts being too new and can break very easily. Regardless it is probably easier to just rent a plot of land in Iceland.
When I started doing inspections (audits) of facilities of pharmaceutical suppliers, I'd visit a lot of data centers. There were hidden away in plain site. Usually the basement of a building or what appeared the basement but was actually a cave underground. I'd go and visit the server used for my company and call it good. I'd mostly go because there data centers were such cool places to visit. There were about half the size of a football field. Nothing huge but still, that's a lot of computers in one place. Later, companies moved away from dedicated data centers and moved to AWS and the like and we didn't know where the data was stored. They had primaries servers with secondaries running full time. Plus tertiary backups. I don't know what they use now. It was a challenge for the pharmaceutical industry to not know the exact server where our data was stored. We've eventually gotten comfortable with it along with FDA.
You want to hear somehing scary? This is a tiny little baby data center.......trust me. You wouldn't believe what we (my company) has orders for, or what the maps look like.
My electric bill is up 100% in the last 10 years with the biggest hikes in the last couple, and my gas delivery charges are also through the roof. They also suck up all the water, contribute absolutely nothing to the local economy, pen secretive deals with local utilities.... So no, I wish they'd all burn to the ground.
Most people around here would throw rocks at me for suggesting this but if we take out even 10% of the vineyards in Napa and install a datacenter or two and some apartment buildings for normal people, I'd be fine with that lol.
All three buildings together is considered small?
My post was not clear; the idea is to put data centers out in the SF Bay for cost effective cooling using ocean water and less need for valuable land.
Yep. I build my first real-time data base mirror in Oregon close to 20 years ago. Lotta earthquakes around these parts...
Nowadays, Microsoft SQL Server and others make it is so easy...
Not only that, but if anything gets nuked it’s going to be military bases first and by the time that happens, you wouldn’t want to be one of the remaining people alive
But do we need this huge increase in them?
Yup..........
Your every post creates the need for more data storage. It’s like asking do we need to product more oil while you are actively using oil.
The podcast touched on this - they simply ignore it (shut that machine down). As you say, it's not practical to repair every single failure so they presumably wait until they reach some threshold before they access them.
You just used more resources of data center(s) by replying. I say "centers" because it's possible that whatever host BITOG uses may replicate data around North America or even the globe, depending on traffic, location of users, and so on.
Is there really a huge increase or is the growth organic ? I think the issue is the average person only now is learning about "data centers" because of a lot of FUD about them. The irony or hypocrisy of the anti-data center movement is hilarious too ! How do they communicate with each other ? Through data centers !
What an odd thing to do. Unless they heatsink the processors directly to the wall of the container, they are flowing cool water through a radiator system inside the container anyway. Why sink it and not just pump cold water through the radiator system pumped from below the surface. The only thing that makes sense is that there is some regulation that doesn't allow you to pump water out of the ocean and onto a land-based structure. Doing this in international waters would be strange as you need to supply the power and have a robust data pipe, which would cost a lot to get that far out.
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The number of data centers (both existing and under construction) in the immediate vicinity of Dulles Airport is staggering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor
https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/virginia?view=Map
They are popping up like weeds. Some have been here for many years but they are multiplying exponentially nowadays. I understand the need for them for the most part, but I disagree with most things AI and the hysteria surrounding it and the boom of data center construction here in the last year is a direct result of that, so it annoys me to see how many new data centers are here now.
But if there's a bright side, every data center is one less condo complex or townhouse neighborhood being built, but that 'bright side' is pretty dim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor
https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/virginia?view=Map
They are popping up like weeds. Some have been here for many years but they are multiplying exponentially nowadays. I understand the need for them for the most part, but I disagree with most things AI and the hysteria surrounding it and the boom of data center construction here in the last year is a direct result of that, so it annoys me to see how many new data centers are here now.
But if there's a bright side, every data center is one less condo complex or townhouse neighborhood being built, but that 'bright side' is pretty dim.
The sudden increase is all about AI.
From a financial perspective. Some of the experiment our work has done shows that there are some work that people can do in 1 afternoon with AI is about the same as 2 months without. It is an extreme case obviously but this is getting a lot of attention from the executives. Meta for example is currently rumored to layoff 10% of the company and switch everyone to have an AI monitor their daily work as an AI trainer. One day those guys would be laid off and replaced with their digital twins.
This is very similar to the beginning of industrial revolution where factory workers building things by hand were replaced with machines running off steam engines. In the short term those guys would be out of jobs and they hated the coal soot emission from the factory chimneys, but in the long term more new jobs were created from those machines in the next 20 years.
Except currently we are not 100% sure where things will go other than people want to take a chance building the infra.
My guess is most of the increase has to do with LNG export ban being lifted so we now sell those gas instead of using it within the US, then the AI, then Ukraine, then Iran.
I remember the days when Shell and Chevron conventional was 29c / quart after rebates too, those days are not coming back.
