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Comment by hunterpayne | Hacker News Reader

Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site.

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> Some of that energy becomes heat.

I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).

Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.

Some? Where else does the energy go?

An electronic circuit drawing 1W of input power will dissipate all of that 1W as heat (assuming it's not outputting light or sound or other physical side effects).

In the macro physics sense, all energy eventually becomes heat somewhere. My 1500W space heater is perfectly efficient and produces 1500W of heat, and my 1500W crypto mining rig does too. Thermodynamically there's no difference. Where would the energy go if not into heat? Even energy that does things like push air or emit radiation, eventually becomes heat somewhere. In the case of a power plant, that somewhere is just very far away with the end user.

Though there might be practical differences though between the excess heat intentionally exhausted, and other heat. Just speaking from a very macro sense.

Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.

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