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[–] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I feel like dumping "waste" heat is the same as burning off "waste" gas from pumping oil.

It's not really just a waste byproduct, there just isn't a profitable way to utilize it. That heat could be used, but we just dump it into the ocean or the atmosphere because it's cheaper than building municipal heating or recycling it for industrial uses.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    China's already doing this with nuclear, so there's a good chance they might do this with data centers too. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-commercial-nuclear-district-heating-scheme-expands

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I heard about that! Heat from data centers is harder, unfortunately, because the amount of waste heat generated by a nuclear reactor is far higher than the amount generated by a data center. With smaller quantities of heat come greater costs to recuperate it, at least until they link all the waste-heat sources up into a single network that can collect from multiple data centers.

    China is moving fast, though. I bet we'll see some kind of project like this before the bubble pops in the US.

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  • [+] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] [S] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    seems like the opposite is happening in practice with models drastically increasing in efficiency

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  • [+] -1 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] [S] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    The fallacy here is the assumption that if LLMs didn't exist then we wouldn't find other ways to use that power.

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  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    That's not a fallacy. REDUCE, reuse, recycle. We shouldn't be looking for new ways to consume more energy or celebrating massive infrastructure projects to power chat bots. The project is cool though

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 10 months ago

    Yes, it is a fallacy because the problem is with the economy system as opposed to a specific technology. The liberal tendency often defaults to a form of procedural opposition such as voting against, boycotting, or attempting to regulate a problem out of existence without seizing the means to effect meaningful change. It's an idealist mindset that mistakes symbolic resistance for tangible action. Capitalism is a a system based around consumption, and it will continue to use up resources at an accelerating rate regardless of what specific technology is driving the consumption.

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  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Boiling the ocean like the Microsoft underwater cloud servers

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    The fact of the matter is that air is an incredibly inefficient thermal conductor so data centers have to burn a massive amount of extra electricity just to run powerful fans and chillers to force that heat away. That extra energy consumption means an air cooled facility is responsible for generating significantly more total heat for the planet than a liquid cooled one.

    When you put servers in the ocean you utilize the natural thermal conductivity of water which is about 24 times higher than air and allows you to strip out the active cooling infrastructure entirely. You end up with a system that puts far less total energy into the environment because you aren't wasting power fighting thermodynamics. Even though the ocean holds that heat longer the volume of water is so vast that the local temperature impact dissipates to nothing within a few meters of the vessel.

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