alt Hacker News> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air
Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!”
Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.
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I’d love that heat in the winter. Imagine, free heat! Linus heats his pool with excess cpu heat. It’s all about using things wisely and not panicking. AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them, but you can leverage their waste for profit.
article also says:
"The geography caveat matters. A data center in the Scottish Highlands and one in Phoenix, Arizona, face very different realities. But even in warmer climates, the shift toward 45-degrees-Celsius coolant moves operators significantly closer to that chiller-less ideal — where chillers may turn on just a few days a year when the outside air temperature demands it."
Maybe, that's why they want Greenland so bad. Low temperature, many free spaces, no significant nature and if there is one, not enough citizen who can complain. And if they still need water for cooling, there is probably enough from the melting ice they can use.
I'd say that in cooler countries, warm water could be very useful, e.g. for heating houses.
Classic "solve one problem, create another" move. At least they are honest about the tradeoffs I guess.
You can’t beat thermodynamics no matter how hard you try.
This shouldn’t be a surprised to the majority of people.
With LLM latencies, you won't notice it much.
Can't beat thermodynamics - there's no free lunch there.
Canada is building a ton of datacenters with this built in.
It's not a sleight of hand.
Datacenter locations mainly optimize power, cooling, and fibre.
Cooling is not the same everywhere, even the US has places that are cool enough to not need evaporative cooling water use.
Waste heat into the atmosphere is hardly pollution. I think you don’t understand the scales involved
To be fair to Nvidia, they are not the first person to dump their waste heat to a Tmin environment. There's a reason most power plants are near bodies of water.
Wouldn't building in the far North be easier than Space? At least better than the desert like Arizona?
Waste heat from these things is negligible compared to the sun heat. I know people love to hate on these things, but come on...
Trust me. In the depths of a northern winter, nobody will complain about "waste heat". Just ask the manetees that huddle near reactor outflows in florida.
On an unrelated note, there are so many em dashes in this article I have to wonder if there was any human involved in the process at all. They could've at least signed Nemotron underneath as to not to offend reality.
Have you stopped for a second to consider the utter mathematical absurdity of what you’re suggesting here?
It is impossible for a datacenter to meaningfully heat more than the air in its immediate vicinity.
Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).