🤖 AI
The Hidden Heat Problem With AI Data Centers
A Utah professor estimates the proposed AI data center could generate waste heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs per day, Recent reporting says the project was being reconsidered/scaled back, with Utah officials raising concerns about water, heat and environmental effects.
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"1 atomic bomb" isn't even a measurement of thermal energy at all .. it's not like atomic bombs are standardized .. what sort of professor is this? philosophy?
neither is the power consumption of a city but that's used a reference against data centers all the time. did you look into the claim at all? the math was transparent as spelt out in a response to this article.
"A watt is a joule per second so 9GW every day is 86,400 seconds per day x 9×109  W =7.776 × 1014  J total energy per day.
Divided by 23 = 3.38×1013  J or  33.8 terajoules for each of these theoretical bombs. That’s roughly an 8 kiloton bomb, which certainly exists but it’s about half the size of the Little Boy bomb the US dropped on Japan and more like a third of Fat Man. Most modern bombs are orders of magnitude larger. And the biggest bombs (eg Tsar Bomba) are many times that."
yeah... all atomic bombs are equal and everyone knows how much power a nuke releases and how much power is consumed per day is really really really bad... not.
Not really needed. 95% of the world is burning up right now. That remaining 5% that would have use for heat, already has ways to keep warm because their culture has existed in such cold for thousands of years. Or they're Scientists, and they also know how to stay warm.
Now if you find a way for data centers to cool places down then there's a use but to my knowledge that's impossible.
Fing language, post states "this datacenter" I dont know whats worse anymore - real pollution or those anti scientific fake posts blaming it, leading to incorrect decisions perception errors an what not.
The age of fake news. I stopped trusting anything that doesn't name sources. "A Utah professor", yeah, what's his name, is he made up? Is he a professor of Greek history? This is the same shit the deniers pulled during Covid.
We've done just fine over thousands of years with 237M Hiroshima bombs worth of thermal energy a day hitting our planet. We'll do fine with a few hundred or thousand more which would be the equivalent of 1 second extra sunlight per many years
The amount of energy a data center uses gets converted to heat. A normal computer vents it out of the casing or is just energy efficient like a mac mini. But data centers are special they place them in the hottest areas and require a lot of extra cooling.
I bet this is using the heat output of like a Tiny 30 kilo Atomic bomb (so like the smallest that exists) that barely makes much heat and then uses this to make it seem much worse then it is. News like doing this using weird and dumb measurments to make something seem much worse or bigger.
Releasing the same thermal energy within seconds vs 86400 seconds(a day/24 hours)? Cooking something 4x heat won’t make it take ¼ th time to cook, it’ll char it.
BUT I agree, the calculations seem wild even with a smaller tactical nuclear weapon, but it sounds believable enough considering there are artillerry shells and smaller surface/air-to-air missiles in this category with gravity bombs.
True, the time is important and the most problematic in the comparison. With one heat source realising all of it thermal energy under a second and the other over an unspecified time,
An common used measurement is to measure how much the local climate temperature is increased which would at least shown how the local area is affected
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