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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:

Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.

Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),

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It actually abuts Hebei which puts it in striking distance of Beijing. I wonder about water though, it’s just grassland so there can’t be much to spare. It would be like building a data center in eastern Oregon.

I thought water is for cooling. They dont need it if its naturally cooled.

Or use closed-loop cooling.

They would need closed loop cooling for the months that weren’t cold enough, well, they would probably need it anyways just that it would be more efficient in the long bitter winter. The extra clean energy from wind and solar might make that reasonable though.

DCs just don’t use that much water.

The enormous water usage values are generally about powerplants providing the power, and even the better reports on that include water use by hydroelectric plants - which makes sense in context of the report, but that context nor sense isn't understood by journalists and hype-men quoting just "trillions of gallons a year, more than X cities"

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