Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
Dont know why i can't reply to the person commenting below. But where's the statistics? Who has these datacenters out in the field?
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russian-satel...
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
Musk comes up with a crazy idea.
Investors, "analysts" and sycophants go to great lengths to defend it.
Rational people wonder if everyone is losing their mind.
Musk profits.
Recall that while he managed to hire the right people to get reusable rockets cheap enough for Starlink, it was also the case that in 2016 he said that SpaceX was aiming to use the 2018 Mars launch window for what is now Starship, and also that some time around 2018 it would be possible to summon your Tesla car from the other side of the country and it would find its way to you autonomously and only stop for charging.
Unless you're counting the ongoing dismissals of those as examples of "they lie for their own advantage"?
On the other hand, while every brain scientist I've heard dismisses Neuralink, every civil engineer dismisses TBC, and bluntly the shiny prospectuses for each of the moon based factories and the Earth-based Optimus factories are on the wrong side of the laws of thermodynamics, I was surprised to see Solar City's roof shingles fail in the marketplace.
Hyperloop was stupid and failed, and it also killed in a few places development of public transport, which of course means people continue to buy cars.
Those communities could be producing something that nobody needs like food.
Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.
[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...
[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...
Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates
https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5924/abb-solutions-power-eur...
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
- "Just make them wage some wars, they'll bury it themselves".
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
https://www.decommsystems.com/resources/what-goes-into-an-il...
Musk and Google.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
You could, of course, repurpose a data-center to run a bunch of emulators and have some h/w to plug in a bunch of SIM cards, but... why? It probably won't be very cost-efficient, and you need some bespoke h/w and virtualization solution to do it...
The bot traffic the news about bombing data-centers refers to is the crawler type. They collect information and index it for later searches, they don't interact with social media.
NB. valid and high value targets are not the same. Valid means it furthers some military goals while minimizing civilian impact. High-value means that it has a potential to alter opponent's strategy.
I'm on the fence about whether data-centers are valid targets. But, even if they aren't, it's not a terrible thing to do to bomb them, as it will not have any severe adverse effects on the civilian population. Of course, in the context of a war where there are much worse things to bomb. But the parent was making a comment about data-centers being high-value targets, and I don't see a way to justify that. It probably doesn't even factor into the calculations of the military strategists.
What's missing for me here is how the data-centers can be connected to generating comments on social media. They are simply not good for doing that. For example, the IP ranges of data-centers are well known, it would be very easy to distinguish between a comment originating from a plausibly private-looking network and data-center network. They are also easy to ban wholesale.
The typical h/w in a data-center isn't designed for the tasks like publishing multiple plausibly authentically looking comments. It would need to pretend to run multiple desktop browser sessions or multiple phone browser sessions. It would need to do this to accumulate some cookies to create an appearance of a real user.
Data-centers are cost-effective when you need to do things in aggregates, or if you have tasks that require large amounts of compute / storage / network. They offer no obvious benefit when it comes to imitating multiple individual desktop or phone users because their h/w is more expensive than the consumer-grade variety. The obvious better way to do that is to buy cheap phones in bulk and run them through user-space application that automates Web browsing.
In a way, what you are suggesting is like building a train track in order to take your child to school: you can make it work, but it will be a lot more expensive than just walking, or, at most, driving to school.
Those things are measurable.
Even if that number is disputable you can measure how many new media posts are about various european issues that russia might want to focus and see how that correlates with Yandex capacity being taken offline.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Hint: It is impossible to cause a Kessler Syndrome at Starlink orbital heights.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
Unless you're talking about an adversary who has ~no launch capability then the person trying to put the data center out of reach is always going to be massively disadvantaged in terms of the physics.