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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been to datacenters, but not the huuuge ones people seem to talk about in the context of AI. They are noisy inside (due to air cooling, which is largely avoided by the tech in the OP), but they’re entirely unremarkable outside compared to any other commercial or industrial building. Computers are not inherently loud, nor is power conversion.

Power plants are all over, even in populated areas. They’re not so bad either (except perhaps coal).

There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

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On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.

Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect. This was never in dispute.

But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.

And if they put them in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why there's a problem.

What I don't understand is putting these things in populated areas.

Would you like to work in the middle of nowhere?

After construction, not all that many people work at a data center. Some ops staff, maybe a small security team.

So let's spit on those 'not so many people' from our ivory tower?

Besides, it's not about people, it's about power. Pulling a few MW into middle of nowhere is prohibitively expensive.

If they can be deployed in low-earth orbit with nobody working on them, they can be deployed 20 miles east of Bumfuck, Nebraska with nobody working on them.

The physical threat model of the Nebraska option does not rely on the tyranny of the rocket to keep intruders away.

The point is that if you don't put them in the middle of somebody's neighborhood, nobody will care to attack them.

The idea of building robust, lightly-staffed technical facilities in obscure places all over the country is nothing even remotely new. It's how the long-distance telephone network was constructed and successfully operated in the decades before satellites took over: https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-...

30 minutes outside of the suburbs doesn't sound like an awful commute.

they just want data centers now. most companies would rather use solar, but they can't on short timelines due to land use regulations (and import tariffs)

It's like anything else in this world. Corner cutting and being shitty leads to shitty outcomes

When I was building data enters in populated areas there were regulations for noise, visual signature, power usage, and etc. It looks like a lot of these newer sites are in low regulation areas. Which is great for profit margin, and not so great for neighbors.

Sounds like the “don’t tread on me” crowd is about to find out the value of regulation.

>There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

Sure there is, being a good neighbor costs more than being a bad neighbor

It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive. It is really an issue.

I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.

IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway

> IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway

I agree, but that's a hard problem (in the US anyway). Unless you're plopping data centers in the middle of national parks, or in the middle of the desert where water is going to be a problem, you are nearly always going to be within some small mile radius of civilization. Plus the cost of trenching new fiber out in the middle of nowhere.

The same reasons humans want to concentrate in a particular area (access to jobs, infrastructure) are the same things that data centers need.

Once water-less cooling tech like this improves then yeah, just plopping them in the middle of the unpopulated desert becomes viable (assuming you can get the fiber out there and latency is tolerable), so long as they generate their own power.

The climate requirements to run at this hotter temperature still probably means it'll require more active cooling in the desert during daytime /summers. Assuming we're talking about hotter desert environments like US southwest. That might make your proposal not as economical.

Imo we should just solve the problems with data centers being near cities. Manage/regulate the noise and any waste (heat included, it shouldn't drastically impact the neighbors) and make them pay for any utility capacity/reliability upgrades needed. If this article is right and water usage can be nearly eliminated then it seems like the rest should be solvable? Especially if we can take the extra heat and use it for local power or heating needs.

You might (but probably not) be able to do district heating with this, but electricity generation is not going to be efficient. Heat is a very low grade form of energy, and you need a large differential to drive a turbine efficiently.

If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta. That isn't even enough for district heating, probably not even with heat pumps.

Now if you have something like a steel foundry, that have much hotter cooling water, you can absolutely use the heat for district heating, but even then it usually isn't enough for cost effective electricity generation. Even when it is waste heat, as the equipment to handle it still costs money and requires maintenance.

> If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta.

You are calculating the wrong delta T. To heat a space, you need your working fluid to be warmer that the space you’re heating by an appropriate amount.

55°C is certainly on the cool side to heat a building, but it’s entirely workable with a high-area, highish-thermal-conductivity system. Here’s an actual chart:

https://www.warmboard.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/WaterTe...

You don’t actually want an absurdly warm floor.

Even for buildings that need warmer fluid, water at 45-55°C is a fantastic source for a heat pump.

55 C might be enough to heat buildings but it's right on the edge where domestic hot water needs to be to kill Legionella. So traditional DH systems need to run hotter.

There low-temp/cold DH systems out there that rely on heatpumps in the buildings to extract the heat. Less losses in the network and you can even use them for cooling, but needs heat pumps everywhere.

In comparison, a traditional heat exhanger is pretty simple technology; just a hunk of metal with a valve.

> I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.

Right. Vibration propagates through solid (and liquid) materials.

But this can all be measured and controlled, and there's nothing special about datacenters. A building that is hundreds of feet away will couple to your pillow much less strongly than a washing machine in your building. And the washing machine often has a wildly unbalanced load and minimal decoupling between itself and the floor, whereas a big fan in a datacenter or other industrial building ought to be balanced and also ought to be installed on decoupling mounts.

If datacenter operators (cough xAI) are being lazy about properly selecting, installing and maintaining equipment, then you can have a problem. Otherwise you have a much smaller problem.

> It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive.

People said this about high voltage electric lines and wind turbines. Blind tests proved they were imagining things.

Look up Benn Jordan's video on datacenter infrasound. Just because you can't perceive the noise doesn't mean it's not there and it doesn't have an effect on the human body, especially over very long periods of time.

That infrasound video is nonsense:

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

That's not a counterargument: it's an ad hominem.

How? He carefully examines and actually reads all the papers referenced in the video and shows that they either don’t support Benn’s claims or completely contradict them? Drawing conclusions about Benn Jordan on this basis is not ad hominem. Given the contents of these papers (i read a few of the abstracts), Jordan either didn’t read the papers, didn’t be understand them or else is being disingenuous.

You are arguing that he came to the "wrong" conclusions without actually arguing against those conclusions, or how he got to them. Instead, you are arguing that a reasonable person can come to your conclusions, and therefore Benn is not a reasonable person.

At no point in his video does Benn claim to be representing the consensus. The whole premise of his videos is that he is introducing something for which there is very little consensus! Each paper has its own conclusions, which don't have to be the same as Benn's. This whole thing boils down to an attack on Benn's character ability to draw meaningful conclusions on his own.

> You are arguing that he came to the "wrong" conclusions without actually arguing against those conclusions

I am not.

Benn claims that the papers say one thing when in fact, if you read them (even the abstracts), they mostly say the exact opposite. It's that simple.

I was a regular viewer of Benn Jordan until seeing one of his videos about how Apple sucked because the iPad was incompatible with so many MIDI and DAW controllers. He went through his devices one by one, plugging them into the iPad and then showing that the iPad didn't recognize the device.

I thought it was a joke of some kind and eventually he would give the "reveal" but no, he finished the video without ever considered that USB is a host/device connection - and although USB-C confusingly introduced a symmetric cable, you cannot connect two devices back-to-back (one end has to be a host) and expect anything useful to happen. And that's why Apple sells a "camera" kit to allow an iPad to act as the host to USB devices.

Seeing him use an oscilloscope to diagnose an Ethernet issue in an earlier video had given me the expectation that he was technically knowledgeable and interesting. So it was shocking that he could present conclusions with such a confident and knowledgeable air, having missed such a basic and fundamental fact about USB.

And there was no push back in the comments that I could see at the time - so seemingly half a million viewers would have finished the video feeling they had learnt something.

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