Or you could build the centers in colder climate areas. Here in Finland it’s common (maybe even mandatory, I’m not sure) for new datacenters to pull the heat from their systems and use that for district heating. No wasted water and at least you get something useful out of LLMs. Obviously using them as a massive electric boiler is pretty inefficient but energy for heating is needed anyways so at least we can stay warm and get 90s action series fanfic on top of that.
There’s experimental storages where heat is pumped to underground pools or sand, but as far as I know there’s heat exchangers and radiators to outside, so majority of excess heat is just wasted to outside. But absolute majority of them are closed loop systems since you need something else than plain water anyways to prevent freezing in the winter.
intense electricity demands, and WATER for cooling.
I wonder if at this stage all the processors should simply be submerged into a giant cooling tank. It seems easier and more efficient.
Or you could build the centers in colder climate areas. Here in Finland it’s common (maybe even mandatory, I’m not sure) for new datacenters to pull the heat from their systems and use that for district heating. No wasted water and at least you get something useful out of LLMs. Obviously using them as a massive electric boiler is pretty inefficient but energy for heating is needed anyways so at least we can stay warm and get 90s action series fanfic on top of that.
What happens to that heat in summer?
There’s experimental storages where heat is pumped to underground pools or sand, but as far as I know there’s heat exchangers and radiators to outside, so majority of excess heat is just wasted to outside. But absolute majority of them are closed loop systems since you need something else than plain water anyways to prevent freezing in the winter.
Microsoft has tried running datacenters in the sea, for cooling purposes. Microsoft blog
brings in another problem, so they have to use generators, or undersea cables.
Fine: make it a data-center powered by water-wheel generators. Water powered AND cooled!