200 kW/rack is absolutely insane to me. The power consumption of these facilities is just...ridiculous.
Like, what in the good god damn are we using all this energy for?
Bad AI porn, terrible AI music, AI scams and completely devastating the labor market.
And based on the recent Anthropic/Pentagon rift... I guess also creating autonomous kill-bots and doing mass surveillance.
Just a bunch of super cool stuff.
? lol
Nestle jumps into my mind whenever I want to think of an evil corporation and water together.
Seems like the environmentally responsible thing to do be to build the datacenter near the coast and use the waste heat to desalinate water. Or at least dissipate the heat into the ocean rather than boiling off an inland freshwater supply.
Keep in mind that the sun is constantly dumping energy on us. Absorption averaged across the entire earth is ~200 W/m^2. Assuming I didn't misplace some zeros somewhere then a gigawatt corresponds to ~5 km^2 of ocean surface. That's the daily flux. Penetration falls off exponentially so 75% of that only ever makes it ~10 m down.
I think the takeaway here is the utterly incomprehensible scale of the ocean.
People talk about the water usage like it's an intrinsic feature of datacenters; it's not. You just make it more expensive so they are forced to conserve. But you wait till you have to so you don't push them to build elsewhere.
Some of the reason for the high density is that you need devices physically close to each other to share such bandwidth. It’s not because we’re limited by the physical building space, because we can construct buildings all day long. Sending bits around at ultra high speed is hard and you need to keep all of the devices physically close to avoid having your interconnect costs explode.
Still, the world I’m used to operating in is typically 5-10 kVA/rack.