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by walrus0115 hours ago |
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upvoteby jltsiren14 hours ago|
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> You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.

Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.

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upvoteby spiderfarmer9 hours ago|
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It's like the Hyperloop all over again.

Musk comes up with a crazy idea.

Investors, "analysts" and sycophants go to great lengths to defend it.

Rational people wonder if everyone is losing their mind.

Musk profits.

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upvoteby kcb8 hours ago|
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Yea, there was even that idea to launch 1000s of satellites into LEO on a reusable rocket system. Crazy. How did people fall for that? There's not even that many satellites in total today.
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upvoteby ben_w5 hours ago|
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It is indeed difficult to tell in advance (and sometimes after the fact) which of his ideas are sensible and which are nonsense.

Recall that while he managed to hire the right people to get reusable rockets cheap enough for Starlink, it was also the case that in 2016 he said that SpaceX was aiming to use the 2018 Mars launch window for what is now Starship, and also that some time around 2018 it would be possible to summon your Tesla car from the other side of the country and it would find its way to you autonomously and only stop for charging.

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upvoteby MiroslavPokorny2 hours ago|
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Its not difficult, people are selfish, so they lie for their own advantage.
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upvoteby sebzim45005 hours ago|
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How did Musk profit from hyperloop? Except as payment for building stuff that actually exists now.
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upvoteby MiroslavPokorny2 hours ago|
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Musk sells cars.

Hyperloop was stupid and failed, and it also killed in a few places development of public transport, which of course means people continue to buy cars.

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upvoteby Brybry13 hours ago|
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Iron Mountain does it but they used an existing limestone mine with a large water reservoir [1][2]

Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.

[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...

[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...

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upvoteby efnx14 hours ago|
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So they want to build it in space. Trade one heat problem for another, but put it completely out of range (for most attackers).
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upvoteby spiderfarmer9 hours ago|
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Yeah, but which attackers do we have to worry about nowadays?

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russian-satel...

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upvoteby killerstorm11 hours ago|
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They already run liquid cooling loops - compute density is way beyond what could circulate through air. Adding more pipes is probably trivial on the scale of datacenter expenses
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upvoteby walrus0111 hours ago|
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Liquid cooling loops don't solve the problem of needing to reject the heat to the atmosphere outside of the building. It just makes it more efficient to transport the heat. At the grossest possible definition, a datacenter of N megawatts on Y acres of land is going to emit the same amount of heat whether it's air cooled equipment or liquid is used to take the heat to the outdoor heat exchanging equipment. On the scale of any very large datacenter the heat exchanging equipment is visible from aerial photos (and from space), take a look at google maps for some of the largest hyperscalers for examples.
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upvoteby killerstorm10 hours ago|
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I assume that "liquid cooling loop" has an endpoint outside of the building which hosts hardware. In this case it's exactly same problem - just make pipes longer.

Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?

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upvoteby m4rtink7 hours ago|
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So how much does the bunker help if you can just drone the cooling systems on the surface? The the computers either cook themselves or have to do an emergency shutdown.
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upvoteby happyopossum2 hours ago|
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If the other end of the cooling loop is a giant reservoir, as is the case with plenty of other 100+ mile water transport systems, it doesn’t matter if you drone it. Fly all the drones you want into Lake Anthropic, there’s many more cubic meters of water than there are drones.
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upvoteby killerstorm7 hours ago|
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It can help to preserve all data and compute. Once cooling can be re-established, you just continue.
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upvoteby kadoban3 hours ago|
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That's something, but if it's no harder to disrupt than if it were out in the open, have you really gained much?
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upvoteby martinjc14 hours ago|
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Pionen in sweden is a datacenter in a bunker. The Pirate Bay used to be hosted there.
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upvoteby walrus0114 hours ago|
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A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
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upvoteby jeltz13 hours ago|
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Pionen is small but it is quite a bit bigger than "a couple of dozen racks". More like 100-200 if I recall correctly.
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upvoteby jacquesm10 hours ago|
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By 1990's standards that was small. Today it is tiny.
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upvoteby martinjc9 hours ago|
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In the US the most common deployed size is below 5MW?

Dont know why i can't reply to the person commenting below. But where's the statistics? Who has these datacenters out in the field?

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upvoteby jacquesm9 hours ago|
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Yes, but that's not where the volume is. A 'small' data center, even here in Europe has 100's of racks. There are of course many tiny ones but collectively they don't even add up to one single large Google or AWS DC. Those things will run in excess of 1 or even 2 GW.
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upvoteby martinjc12 hours ago|
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According to their site, Pionen has 1.5MW of cooling capacity https://swedendedicated.com/datacenter/
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upvoteby testaccount2814 hours ago|
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neat. why can't you put the heat in the mountain?
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upvoteby walrus0114 hours ago|
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For broadly the same reason that many years of heat from braking has heat-saturated the london underground.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...

You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.

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