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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I think this is really a rosy image of China’s electrify situation. They have huge needs in the east and green energy in the west, they can’t build their UHV links fast enough. They are doing ok at keeping up, but there isn’t a surplus of cheap electricity lying around in the same places where you have cheap water as well.

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What is stopping them from just building their data centers in the west where they have energy surplus? Not like you need to locate a data center inside a city.

Water. The west is really dry. We could throw in data lines as well but it’s really bottlenecked by water. Actually the only place in China with water in abundance is southeast China.

Also they really don’t have the chips to supply those data centers, and the government isn’t so crazy to go that aggressive on AI, they have lots of other priorities as well.

I wonder if submerged system with coolant could mitigate this ?

One of China's big sources of power is hydroelectric such as the Three Gorges Dam, so if you want electricity and water in one place, then there it is.

Try doing evaporative cooling in a swamp and tell me how that works.

So then don't do that - the US trend is towards closed-loop cooling.

Yes, you have to save water even when you don’t need to, especially in China.

Evaporative cooling is a matter of convenience and cost, not a necessity. Other cooling technologies can be used. Intel has already proven a closed-loop system can work just as well.

Chinese data centers like to use air cooled chillers for cooling, not evaporative coolers. It's simple because power for the chillers is cheaper than water for the evaporative coolers. The opposite is true in the US

For example see the data centers in china's inner mongolia region, china's data center Hub like Virginia is in the US, where Deepseek is building a data Center campus

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