Comment by vitally3643
2 hours ago
The noise pollution is quite significant in the immediate area, and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area. That also of course ignores air and water pollution caused by the increased demand on electricity generation (or jet turbines spun up in the parking lot).
But the point is they suck up land and resources for no material or economic benefit to the local population. There's absolutely no reason to build these things in or even near cities. They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
But are they really at the same level of disruption as any steel, chemical, nuclear, gas, manufacturing, recycling... plant? A mine? A port? Industrial farming?
I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.
In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.
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I’m sure there is real data and real math available.
For heating: imagine a 1km^2 campus. That’s 1e6 m^2, and peak daylight is around 1kW/m^2. So peak daylight on the campus is about 1GW. (Wow, just covering the whole campus with solar panels would be pretty awesome!) If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.
As for noise, there is no substantial noise emission inherent to the operation, so I expect it largely comes down to how hard the facility tries to mitigate accidental noise and how well local regulators enforce sound measurement and control. Consider a high-end Noctua or similar fan, compared to a super cheap fan of comparable RPM, flow, and static pressure — a 30dB difference in emitted sound is entirely plausible. The datacenter has some switching noise from handling its 1GW of power, but it also has lots and lots of fans and pumps.
An LLM informs me that 1kW of acoustic energy radiated into free air (no surfaces) is 79dB SPL, Z curve (unweighted), at a range of 1km. So if 1 part per million of the datacenter’s power consumption ends up as noise, it’s loud. There are all manner of corrections needed. For example, your ears’ sensitivity is much lower at non-peak-sensitivity frequencies. But the data center isn’t in free air, and the effect of the ground, the atmosphere under appropriate circumstances, and the height of the datacenter could easily dramatically increase the intensity at longish distances.
A lot of this boils down to large datacenters using immense amounts of power and that power being something you would prefer not to have redirected at you in any form.
> If you put a 1GW datacenter there, that is equivalent to full daylight, with zero albedo, 24/7. Hmm, I’d rather live at a considerable distance from just the dissipated heat.
Doesn't this comparison fall apart when you consider that the heat is going to be dissipated across a large area? The reason why stuff gets so hot during the day is that the surrounding areas also get heated, so there's nowhere for the heat to escape other than up. If only 1sq km is getting heated, and that's getting dissipated, the effect is going to be far less than your implied comparison of 2 suns. To bring it back to your example, a patch of payment in the sun (ie. 1kW/m^2) can get scorching hot. But in absolute terms it's less than the output of a space heater (typical one is 1.5KW), not even enough to keep a room warm.
Yes, absolutely, but it will depend on where one is, the surrounding geography, etc.
A hairdryer pointed at me from 1m away running 24/7 will make me notably warmer. A hairdryer 20m away is probably unnoticeable. A 1GW datacenter is a lot of hairdryers. At some scale, there is probably a buoyancy effect such that cooler air will be drawn in near the surface, get heated, and convect upwards, so I could even believe that a monster datacenter would cool some surrounding areas. (The sun inland from the west coast in the US has this effect during certain seasons, and AIUI this is a good part of the reason that the areas very near the coast tend to be dramatically cooler than inland areas in the spring and early summer.)
> and the heat output notably raises outdoor temperatures in a surprisingly wide area
There was a study posted here on this exact topic a few weeks back. The most they could measure was a little over 1 degree C near the datacenter.
> But the point is they suck up land and resources
Land use for a datacenter is kind of negligible. Even the largest data centers are barely a rounding error compared to all of the other commercial and industrial operations around me.
Like it's not even close.
> They can be built in the middle of nowhere where they don't bother anyone with zero impact on the services they provide.
For what it's worth, all of the data center projects I've looked up near me are being built in remote or industrial areas. It hasn't stopped the protestors, who are arranging for bus transport to get to the sites because they're so far away.
That paper was 100% garbage. It hinged entirely on the observation of 1 huge industrial park in Bajio, Mexico, which contains one AWS data center and about 3000 auto parts factories. The before/after breaking point of the effect was during the time that the park went from bare ground to industrial park. It has nothing to do with the data center.
Interesting. So the minimal heat rise observed was from the total transformation of the entire area and they blamed it all on the datacenter?
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I think the idea that they raise outdoor temps over a wide area is a myth spread on facebook. The physics doesn't work out.
Just adding a square kilometre of parking lots raises the surrounding temperatures measurably, so I don't see how building a datacenter that size is going to have less impact