Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!”
Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.
That plus all the gas turbines powering it which release many tons of gasses.
And finally all the infrasound from the DC and its generators have impacts on humans and all creatures for many miles away.
Oh and the water consumption.
"is" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The data centre doesn't exist.
But the work is out there, for instance Miara et al. Thermal pollution impacts on rivers and power supply in the Mississippi River watershed, Environ. Res. Lett. 13 034033 (2018)
Worthington et al. The effects of a thermal discharge on the macroinvertebrate community of a large British river: implications for climate change. Hydrobiologia 753, 81–95 (2015)
Lukšienė, Sandström, Lounasheimo, and Andersson. The effects of thermal effluent exposure on the gametogenesis of female fish. Journal of Fish Biology, 56: 37-50 (2000)
Penk and Williams. Thermal Effluents from Power Plants Boost Performance of the Invasive Clam Corbicula Fluminea in Ireland's Largest River. Science of The Total Environment, vol. 693 (2019)
Shouldn't spread misinformation when there are plenty of other valid points about datacenters.
That's the extraordinary claim. That is what should need citation, not the other way around.
Those that do - power generating facilities, large smelters, etc. - have very significant environmental footprints.
Some nuclear power plants use rivers and lakes, that’s bad for their ecosystems if it’s too much but this system uses dry coolers so the extra heat should be negligible
Residential house emit heat too, but - most of the time - we don't consider them "destroys local ecosystems".. Maybe they do, but we don't treat them as a boolean thing, we try to understand the impact...
You are missing the context of the ecosystem - the topic is water ways. Homes aren't raising the temperature of local waterways which can wipe out entire fish and other aquatic populations while encouraging growth of oxygen depleting organisms and algae. Instead of a river or stream you have a dead stinking waterway.
That's one of several reasons why a citation is warranted.
> capture heat directly at the source and transport it to outdoor dry coolers, essentially large radiator coils positioned outside the building.
The heat goes into the air
Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.
Dumping hot water into rivers harms ecosystems regardless of whether anyone happens to do it right now, and asking for a citation for that is such a WTF in and of itself we really shouldn't gloss over it.
And nothing at all is too stupid of a question to want an answer to. That way leads to people screaming at each other over social media instead of engaging with facts.
"We should do X."
"X is not possible."
There was an implied claim that X is possible and an explicit claim that X is not possible, but often it feels that in such a scenario, it is the second individual who is deemed having a burden of proof.
This is made all the worse that there is rarely a single implied claim, but more a group of related implied claims that are also weighted. Like some combination of "data centers don't destroy the environment" and "or maybe they do, but only in amounts of destruction that are tolerable compared to human behaviors and worth the outputs gained" and even "they modify the environment, but it doesn't count as destruction, just change". And even worse (yet again), different readers of the conversation will find themselves placing different weights on these different interpretations making it near impossible to agree on what the original claim is. Thus the first person who makes an explicit claim gets all the attention which ignores all the messy implied human communications preceding it.
"The geography caveat matters. A data center in the Scottish Highlands and one in Phoenix, Arizona, face very different realities. But even in warmer climates, the shift toward 45-degrees-Celsius coolant moves operators significantly closer to that chiller-less ideal — where chillers may turn on just a few days a year when the outside air temperature demands it."
2. Alaska has all of those things. (Though there's plenty of "significant nature" in both Greenland and Alaska.)
https://resources.telegeography.com/telegeography-content-pr...
This shouldn’t be a surprised to the majority of people.
It's not a sleight of hand.
Datacenter locations mainly optimize power, cooling, and fibre.
Cooling is not the same everywhere, even the US has places that are cool enough to not need evaporative cooling water use.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/06/as-lone-star-tick...
Or malaria.
What a disingenuous comparison, do you hear yourself?
It is impossible for a datacenter to meaningfully heat more than the air in its immediate vicinity.
I mean there are a lot of solutions to making more power or making more efficient chips but to trivialize the impacts of AI as anti Ai propaganda which is how this comment comes of its a bit propaganda minded itself. I think backlash to AI is direct result of strawmaninh Anti AI as having only deranged opinions and anti progress. Where the datacenters are located people suffer because of high velocity don't care about consequences thinking. Every industry has to planing around people or people will do something crazy like burn the centers or try and nationalize data centers. I definitely think that would be stupid but don't underestimate stupid
Many AC in a limited space covered in concrete with almost zero tree in the area is another thing.
We need to be more specific about what we are talking about.
Anyway ACs are not enough in a city. ideally you also want streets with a significant amount of trees and greenery so that there is significant shade and heat from sunlight doesn't radiate too much from concrete/pavement.
Very funny to deride France education when you are the ignorant one here.
No free lunch.
Sounds more like a threat than something desired
Ofcourse it is easier when they are all owned by foreign companies lol. If they actually made money and provided jobs (lmao) it might be different.
It takes one recesssion and all datacenter spending will get rolled back. Yes technology will not go away, AI has been here for over many decades that doesn't mean the current paradigm will continue always and exactly the same forever into the future. If history shows us anything its that paradigms change
Maybe you can't (or don't want to), but people can absolutely fight data center construction. Your lack of imagination doesn't bind others.
I propose that you don’t actually want cheap tokens. You want cheap tokens in service of some other goals. Are they worth the environmental cost?
They don’t have to be bad for the environment. We can mandate that all new data centers be entirely solar+battery powered.
Not that this is an apples to apples comparison but imagine people saying that about nuclear reactors. Yes, we want them to be as safe as possible and as efficient as possible but that doesn't mean we don't build it. And at the risk of being a NIMBY, AI data centers don't have to be located right next to my house. Unlike regular data centers, these can and should be in the frigid cold. That would probably be for the best anyway. All it needs is redundant fiber network connection, right? Also we should probably require all AI data centers to use renewable energy only. All these are doable but the fight against AI data centers has to be practical and solutions oriented, not fighting it for the sake of fighting it.
Any safety measure that requires the humans to do the right procedures the right way for 10^5 years is not safety.