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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. BearOso · 1791154950 · focus · HN ↗
  The disparity is that older data centers were for storing and serving data. They have a lot of bandwidth and storage, but aren't consuming much energy. Plus, they are there to provide quicker access to data, to provide a service to actual people.
  New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
  Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
  These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
  With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
  1. Lucasoato · 1791157708 · focus · HN ↗
    > At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss
    Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
    snaking0776 · 1791159649 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t find this wholly convincing since it’s a smaller scale search but there does seem to be some truth to noise issues: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo also some data here which seems to support OP during generator tests: <a href="https://www.lsars.com/data-center-noise" rel="nofollow">https://www.lsars.com/data-center-noise
    perching_aix · 1791161156 · focus · HN ↗
    I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He
    - explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
    - played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
    - showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
    - did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
    - did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured
    - kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
    If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
    JimDabell · 1791183018 · focus · HN ↗
    The video is nonsense. There’s an article that takes it down in detail here:
    <a href="https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and" rel="nofollow">https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

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