Years ago Google complained that they couldn’t fill up their data centers because they had hit the limits of electrical code. Servers plus A/C took them into no man’s land as far as electrical code was concerned. That also means wasted real estate.
Probably less than you think. To be precise, for every x watts of power Google needs about y = 0.12*x watts of cooling (and other overhead) on average. That's based on the PUE number at <https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal....
> Years ago Google complained that they couldn’t fill up their data centers because they had hit the limits of electrical code. Servers plus A/C took them into no man’s land as far as electrical code was concerned. That also means wasted real estate.
I don't remember that, but I'm guessing it was from the days Google's servers were in datacenters built by other companies. They probably outfitted so many circuits at x volts / y amps each, and there's only so much you can do with that.
(To be precise, Google still runs some servers in non-Google datacenters, as part of running a CDN. But this isn't the bulk of Google's processing power.)
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/11/p...
"Power shift: Data centers to replace aluminum industry as largest energy consumers in Washington state"
Large custom data centers draw on the order of 300MW, a non-scientific survey of aluminum smelters on the web has their draw around 400-700MW, so I'd be careful about 'ever will'.
Smelting issues a lot of power in a very small space resulting in a lot of heat, where computing it not getting anywhere close to that in terms of density, just in aggregate over giant data centers.
But I’m not sure I understand your point. I look Google Maps images of the Wenatchee Alcoa works and the Google Data center in the Dalles and they seem order-of-magnitude the same size to my eyeballs.
You seem to think I don’t appreciate how much energy aluminum smelting requires - I do. But imagine the heating element of your aluminum crucible broken into a million pieces, each piece with a cooling system to keep its temperature down. That’s a data center.
Large data centers are huge building, the density is very much limited by heat issues and while the building might get bigger the power demand per square foot does not. We can move lots of power through very small areas consider individual steam turbines are up at 600 MW.
Even if we start talking about GW for a single datacenter, the single Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant is already 8GW.
A data center is a much more domesticated space and are often near commercial and residential areas not Industrial.
Wikipedia has a list of aluminum smelters and I notice none of the biggest are in the US. Is that just because, or due to code limitations?
Not sure if it was changes in these contracts or other market forces that caused the decline.
https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/alu...
The last active NW aluminum smelters closed in 2016. Most of the rest were victims of Enron and the 2000 energy crisis.