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Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

356 points · 458 comments · sensanaty

aliasxneo · 1791145670 · focus · HN ↗
I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
1. cogman10 · 1791149243 · focus · HN ↗
  Did your datacenter consume 9GW?
  I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
  The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
  1. dipierro · 1791156173 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think that 1MW is something older datacenters consumed. Unless you are talking about a single rack in a corporate server room.
    It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
    Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
    [deleted] · 1791159560 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    crote · 1791159593 · focus · HN ↗
    You're confusing MW with MWh. Older DCs did indeed consume on the order of 1MW of continuous power, like the one at [0]. The 2012-dated DC at [1] has a redundant 22kW power feed per 42U rack, so that's ~500W per RU - which for most pre-AI servers was plenty.
    With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
    [0]: <a href="https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delft/" rel="nofollow">https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
    [1]: <a href="https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/data-center-utrecht-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
    cogman10 · 1791159635 · focus · HN ↗
    You are confusing MW with MWh and apparently kWh.
    A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
    1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
    A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.

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