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Comment by mlinhares | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why we don't see datacenters in places with "infinite" potential for electricity generation in cold climates like Iceland. If your workload isn't sensitive to external network latency (you're just crunching numbers or doing long running computation in data you can move there at a normal pace), that sounds very cheap.

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Remote northern Sweden has quite a few datacenters for that reason!

Luleå, Pitea, and Boden are all way too remote for datacenters to be there for any other reason.

https://www.datacentermap.com/sweden/

We do. Microsoft, google, Facebook and apple have big data centers in des moines to take advantage of the cheap wind power. The local utility claims last year they generated more wind power than customers used in electric.

Pretty sure Google's data center is in Council Bluffs, but yeah. Iowa produces the greenest energy of any state in the country with upwards of 60% of its energy coming from renewables in 2022 (and climbing rapidly).

Washington produces 67% of its power with hydroelectric and wind is another 8ish percent with wind.

I suppose you can argue with how "green" hydroelectric is, but in terms of CO2, it's pretty good.

Oh wow; I could swear I saw Iowa at the top of a bunch of “states by state of renewable energy” lists, usually followed by south dakota. I feel like there must be some difference in how these lists are measuring things that I’m missing.

How much of that is ethanol from corn though?

I don’t think any of it is ethanol. These figures are about electricity generation and it’s like 62% wind out of 63% renewables or something like that.

They got to make windmills rated for South Dakota, drove the entire width of that state with a North wind and I had to drive with my wheel turned entirely to the right. By the time I got to Montana I thought I needed new tires, the tire guy asked me how long I'd be there, I said only that night then driving straight back. He told me don't bother the tires will wear back to even on my return trip.

You still need personel in the datacentre. Remote location makes it more difficult. But I woiuld imagine that latency is the biggest issue. Even university super computers - where I would imagine latency is not an issue tends to be close by.

Yes you need personnel but not very many. Local governments that give these tax incentives for data centers often think the presence of a data center is going to lead to a lot of high tech jobs. This is simply not true. If you’ve ever walked around a data hall in a big data center, it’s an amazingly creepy and lonely place. The first time I visited a huge data center in Altoona Iowa I was shocked at how few people there were.

most employees at faang data centers are contractors at rates like $30/hr, nowhere near the faang salaries.

dont need CS grads to do racking and stacking compute appliances, might as well hire associates from home depot

datacenters are the new plantation

There was this underwater datacenter https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718 see also here: https://natick.research.microsoft.com/

Talk about difficult maintenance

I'd imagine the optics of this have changed with the recent focus on ocean surface temps. I would also bet the negative PR of pumping waste heat directly into cold climates would offset any savings.

The heat we directly dump into the environment, except where it affects the local ecosystem directly (e.g. warm rivers killing local wildlife, algae blooms) is a quite laughable portion of the global warming problem - greenhouse gases are multiple orders of magnitude more effective (at being part of the problem).

Oceans are insanely large (citation needed) heat sinks.

> Oceans are insanely large (citation needed) heat sinks.

If my math is right (hopefully), and assuming there's no cooling (hopefully not), it would take 790 billion years for Microsoft's datacenter to raise the temperature of the ocean by 1 degree.

(1.426e21 kg * 4184 J/kg) / (240000 J/s * 31536000 s/yr)

You claim this, but my own simulations show the oceans boiling away to nothingness in just a few billion. Are you certain you did the math correctly?

Fortunately, we have ZFS for that!

https://web.archive.org/web/20180223071740/https://blogs.ora...

"Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans."

- straight from the horse's mouth (that's Jeff Bonwick, who created ZFS).

I think it is disingenuous to pretend that I am making an argument on logistical, thermodynamic, oceanographic, etc. grounds. I claimed one thing - bad optics, bad public relations.

Sea surface temps are in the environmentalist spotlight at the moment. Between when Microsoft started their pilot program in 2018 and now, surface temps have changed dramatically. Some experts believe this change has made storms more energetic and less predictable.

Salt-water cooled power plants along with desalination plants have been getting pushback from environmentalists for years because of the negative effects of their heated effluent. This will only intensify.

For Microsoft, public relations have a documented cost. My claim is that their PR team would say that right now the cost of a large phase II deployment would outweigh the savings.

Yes and: Some localized heating is very consequential.

If it was that big a deal, they would channel the waste heat to useful purposes such as heating nearby homes for free. The marketing benefits are obvious.

What you describe is becoming more common with land based datacenters. The linked Microsoft project wouldn't allow the waste heat to be repurposed.

That'd be great. The Volts podcast just had an episode about district heating. Data centers were among the list of readily available heat sources. Also reduces the data center's cooling costs. Win/win.

What's the deal with district energy? [2023-10-07] https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-district-energy

TIL: There's already 1,000s (?) of heating & cooling districts in North America. The number of buildings added is increasing 5% annually.

https://www.districtenergy.org/home

Iceland absolutely does do that. There are multiple icelandic datacenter operators trying to get european customers with the promisse of being powered by cheap renewable energy.

(But Iceland's potential isn't as "infinite" as it may sound. Yeah, they could still build plenty of electricity generation. But they stopped massively building out electricity generation after building the Kárahnjúkar power plant, which was probably the most controversial infrastructure project in Iceland ever. They still build smaller hydropower plants and lately a bit of wind.)

Connectivity could be easy. There's lots of extant subsea fiber connections in the Arctic region, because of satellite downlink stations there (polar satellite orbits are an easy way to guarantee revisits to the same Earth location, every orbit cycle). Fucking Svalbard, of all places, has 2.5 terabits of dark fiber, paid for partly by the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System

https://spacenorway.no/en/what-we-do/operational-infrastruct...

And the inverse is true as well: Starlink, the LEO satellite constellation, [edit: this is *no longer true*] spends the most loiter time and has the highest coverage, highest bandwidth, over the poles. I imagine you could plausibly get high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite backhauls from an Arctic datacenter.

It’s Iridium that had best coverage over the poles (and actually useful because they’ve had inter-sat links since day 1). As all sats went right over the poles and that’s where latitude rings are the shortest.

Meanwhile starlink has its poorest coverage over the poles, you can see mostly hollow space near the poles: https://satellitemap.space/

My knowledge was out of date! Still, the general principle's visible in that 3d visualization: the density of satellites is greatest at the highest latitudes within their range. They cluster there where the derivative d{latitude}/dt goes to zero.

Iceland is trying to grow its datacentre industry on the back of having large amounts of cheap and "green" electricity and a cold climate. I think historically its relative remoteness in terms of connectivity has been something of a constraint, but they have been working to address this with new submarine fibre cables recently.

To some extent, we do. Quincy, Washington is one of the most popular data center locations in the U.S. The general vicinity of Motreal, Quebec (in Canada) is also pretty popular.

Neither is Iceland, but both have relatively low temperatures and cheap hydroelectric power.

We might eventually see these data centers in space, for 24/7 solar power.

Cooling could be an issue.

Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verne_Global ?

I’ve wondered that too, and earthquakes/eruptions is my guess. They are more prevalent and unpredictable where geothermal power is available.

Or, the sea floor, right? Most human settlement is near the ocean, go off the coast a bit and then down a couple hundred meters.

Microsoft recently did an experiment testing that.

The problem is that making a submersible data center is also expensive.

Did their pods use OTEC for power? If so, that’s really neat.

Not that I know of but that would be cool

We do. DeepL advertises that they run all of their things (presumably ML training) on such data centers.

I guess we could put a data center in space, powered by solar. But that sounds silly.

You could not. There would be no place to get rid of the waste heat.

Elton John told me that space is cold as hell. Presumably the ISS is putting its waste heat somewhere, but I don't really know the limitations of radiators in space.

- "Presumably the ISS is putting its waste heat somewhere"

Giant radiators:

http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/images/iss028e005676.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...

Fluid pipes are threaded through them for transferring heat. These contain mixed-phase ammonia: I believe it should condense from vapor to liquid under the radiators, the coldest point. That phase change adds a huge boost to their heat-carrying capacity.

A cubic meter of space has very little heat energy, that's true, but it's more about having only a few molecules here and there in any cubic meter of space. That leads directly to the problem though, that if there are no molecule to contact you and steal some kinetic energy and then leave, reducing your heat, the only option is to radiate it away. Radiating heat is exceptionally inefficient at rejecting heat from an object than using a material of some sort to sap away that heat with physical contact.

Space is around -270°C cold. The heat would dissipate so quickly, much better than even liquid nitrogen cooling.

Without convection or conduction?

ok to correct myself. Due to lack of much air, heat would only dissipate by Black body radiation. One would need to calculate if that could cool down the chips efficiently.

It won't. There is reason why we use fans. There is two ways to handle high heat loads, convection or evaporation. And you would run out of evaporative material in space pretty quickly.

I think this is a very popular mistake to make. It is sort of a well known bit of trivia, but only because everybody has to correct themselves on it at least once, haha.

If it's dissapating through black body radiation the temperature of space isn't really that relevant to cooling.

You can radiate heat from the surface of the earth into space via the sky, but you don't lose much energy that way.

> You can radiate heat from the surface of the earth into space via the sky, but you don't lose much energy that way.

That's not quite true. Black body radiation is the only reason why earth does not heat up much more. It's the only factor with a negative radiative forcing.

Solar radiation is the only main incoming source of energy, and black body radiation the only outcome with almost the same magnitude (which is huuuuge btw)

What I mean that building a system to radiate radiate energy into space from the surface of the earth isn't very cost effective, and it's undoubtedly far less expensive than building a system you would launch into space.

The actual surface of the earth has the advantage of being able to use the whole surface of the earth.

On earth you can use things like fans and evaporative cooling. It's far superior to making huge space radiators, but nothing is free.

You would think so, but that's not as simple as you would think. On Earth that cooling generally happens by conduction and convection to the air.

In space there is mostly no atmosphere, you have to radiate that heat which isn't quite as easy as it sounds: https://www.space.com/21059-space-station-cooling-system-exp...

If you think about why a vacuum flask or thermos is used to keep drinks hot (or cold) for an amount of time you'll realise that space / a vacuum is a very good insulator.

An object in space loses heat according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation. That use the fourth power of the temperature differential so you get boost from the background of space being -270C. BUT the Stefan-Boltzmann constant is 5.67 × 10−8 J/s · m2 · K4 and that is the problem.

You can do the numbers yourself but various internet sources suggest that spacecraft radiators can only cool between 100 and 350 W of internally generated heat per square meter. That is a big radiator for not much cooling.

Air cooling occurs by convection which is completely absent in space. Similarly, advection and convection seem unlikely to contribute much. That leaves mainly radiation which is a lot slower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer#Heat

You can radiate it away, but it would be really hard compared to just dumping it to atmosphere / water bodies. Especially as computers need quite low temperatures.

Here is some more analysis on the problem of radiating heat away in space: https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/07/all-radiators.html

Facebook built a datacenter in Luleå, near the arctic circle.

How much cloud workload is 100 async from everything else? And while eletricity might be cheap I guess you loose that gain from taxes on importing equipment and trying to recruit qualified staff.

Maybe AI training would work but there you get into data security issues. These are often custom builds with special security measures to stop spying / theft

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