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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

It probably is pretty good for datacenters. You would save a ton on cooling cost. And CO2 footprint as a result. Not that current US cares about that but the rest of the world does.

And you don't have to own a country to put datacenters there. Simply investing there will bring jobs and money for the inhabitants, will make profit for the investor, it's a win win.

Forcibly taking it over will make a lot of enemies and disruption to trade. It will make less profit overall, especially once the population starts destroying your company assets, connection lines etc. Not to mention all the second tier effects in global lost trust from trading partners.

But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?

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>It probably is pretty good for datacenters.

The cooling would be a bonus, but you also can't ignore all the negatives. No power, limited roads, no deep harbour, no skilled support staff, no fiber, no backup fiber, latency, geopolitical uncertainty, thawing permafrost etc

I'd bet the biggest compute in the country is on the US base already...

> You would save a ton on cooling cost

I'm not sure that you would. You might think that cooler ambient temperatures mean less cooling required, but it's really a matter of rapid heat transfer away from chips, which is why electronics in satellites need active cooling, despite the temperature of space being near absolute zero.

Yes, you'd still need a full forced air cooling system (especially with modern datacentre densities), so the only gain would be from the there being a higher temperature gradient for your heat exchangers to work with.

There's no way that by itself would make enough of a difference to justify building a dc there, given all the other negatives that others have mentioned.

Actually modern datacenters, such as xAI's Memphis one, are now using liquid cooling since the power density of SOTA chips demands it.

That data center likely still uses liquid to liquid heat exchangers with a chilled water loop and cooling towers to reject heat outside, but I could be wrong. Piping refrigerant around a massive building costs way more than chilled water, same goes for filling up the system, glycol and water is cheaper than refrigerant.

That's inevitable, really, given the way power densities have been increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if people weren't also experimenting with high pressure Helium and similar technologies.

It's certainly a far cry from opening some windows and stringing a few fans together in the hope that the chilly outside air will be enough to keep things cool!

Before we go down that path, datacenters full of oil tubs seems to be a trend in some spaces. Very good cooling power, low-tech heat extraction (small pumps to make the oil move, car radiators with big simple plumbing... do the trick well).

If you want to save a ton on cooling costs, wouldn't it be just easier to build those data centers in Alaska? Or if they don't have to be in America, there are lots of options in Northern Europe with better infrastructure than Greenland.

But of course you're right, really it's mostly about map-painting.

There's a theory I heard somewhere recently that part of the reason Trump is so interested in Greenland is due to his lack of understanding of maps.

The Mercator projection (which is how most 2D maps are displayed) makes Greenland appear to be the size of North America. It's large, to be sure (around 25% bigger than Alaska), but it's certainly not continent sized.

Obviously thats no justification for his actions, but found the explanation at least a bit amusing given his other odd misunderstandings (eg thinking people seeking asylum are from an insane asylum, thinking wind mills somehow affect whales, etc. The list goes on and on...)

Considering he thought it was "hole" milk, I'm choosing to believe it.

I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.

I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_ which is the a ridiculous thing to hear from a leader of a country.

Iceland based data centers are able to cut their energy usage for cooling by 24-31% compared to US/UK equivalent due to the climate [0].

[0]: https://eandt.theiet.org/2022/12/12/iceland-coolest-location...

> I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.

It is increasingly becoming so. And some designs work well. I only read a post about the internet archive's smart use of the server heat a couple days ago, I can't find it back now. And indeed, good point. Alaska would be great for that too.

And the US is kinda an exception, the rest of the world is watching emissions but the US is trying to screw the world up for everyone else. Including themselves but Trump followers seem to view all the disasters as an 'act of god'. I remember those poor school kids in the flooding in texas last year and there being more 'thoughts and prayers' than actual help or prevention.

I know Ireland is popular for datacenters in part because of the climate there (in another big part all the tax breaks but ok).

And yes you can cool them with renewable energy. Most datacenters are. But it also means that renewable energy can't be used for something else.

>I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_

Does he actually know the difference between "mine" and "the US'" though? I was under the assumption that since the US is his, anything important for him is also important for the US, and vice versa.

Oddly enough your comment uses the same authoritarian techniques of distract and befuddle the audience.

What a worthless pile of bits you've dumped on the world.

>But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?

It's about breaking up NATO for Putin.

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