Water usage is going to be highly dependant on your local climate. All the new AI data centres are direct liquid cooling so other than filling the cooling loops in the right location you will never need additional water. The problem is building them in hot places say Arizona, California etc. were especially in the summer you need water for evaporative cooling.
For example even in the UK you will need some evaporative cooling should you stupidly decided to put your AI data centre in the South of England. Come to Scotland and you can run free air cooling 24x7 every day of the year and have a really significant margin over the maximum daytime air temperature ever recorded.
Bear in mind that the Soviet Union weaponized pneumonic plague, creating stains with multi-antibiotic resistance and increased environmental stability.
posting to undo moderation
Since when has the British Isles not been part of Europe? Please stop equating Europe with the European Union, the two are not the same.
No cancer does not hit everyone equally. If you smoke you are more likely to be hit by cancer, and if you are over weight you are more likely to be hit by cancer. These two factors are the biggest avoidable ones for cancer.
In the UK at least (and I doubt it is different in any western country) those factors are overwhelmingly prevalent in lower socioeconomic groups. That is the better off you are the less likely you are to be a smoker and the less likely you are to be overweight so the less likely you are to get cancer.
This is fine if you are comfortable showing that SOME chip can be run in space at SOME cost, but it skips all the details that drive whether a data center in space is will work logistically and economically. There are many of these details, including but not limited to:
- Is it possible to use convective cooling in space? If so, how does one design it so that the convective fluid doesn't just dissipate? If not, can chips be designed that successfully evacuate heat radiatively or do the chips burn themselves up?
- What is the balance between collecting energy on the sun side of the system and protecting equipment from cold on the shaded side? Does the equipment have to survive large temperature cycles? If it can't does the data center have to use thrust to rotate itself to keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool? What would that mean for design cost, for refueling?
- How does all of this equipment (solar panels, batteries, GPUs, communication equipment, thrusters, control systems) deal with the high levels of ionizing radiation in space?
- The design and duty cycle of all these pieces of equipment implies various levels of refueling, repair, etc. Assuming all that can actually be done successfully at rocket's length, is the total cost within what the market will pay?
These details whether a data center can be made operational at all and if so whether their economics make them worth doing.
What Google is doing strikes me as a pretty sensible step - put a few chips in space and see what happens.
What Elon Musk does is claim that something will be solved next year and do some pump-and-dump crap around a company he claims will be doing that thing next year.
Where is "Full Self Driving", as in you can actually let the car drive and not monitor it? Where are the fleets of "Optimus" robots? Where is Tesla's super-awesome battery tech? And the Cybertruck that can float?
Oh right, they'll all be here at {year} + 1.
Data from Scotland shows that cervical cancer rates in the cohort of women eligible for the vaccine who took it up is a big fat zero. That is there is no rounding in that it is actually none whatsoever.
Sadly, it often is faster to do that than work within the old bureaucracy and its entrenched people, rules, and regulations.
This is pretty much a textbook case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.
Notwithstanding Hegseth's absymal record prior to and within the Department of Defense/War/Being Tough, the war in Ukraine has showed how different war can be run than the way our military is currently organized.
Even if if you don't buy the army having "Transformers" type robots punching each other out (and I don't), it's clear that there is going to be a lot of "AI"-ish and highly automated stuff fighting wars. There needs to be a unit devoted to understanding FPV drones on land, sea, and air, plus all of the infrastructure for using them, defending against them, the communications to run them, training people to manage these kinds of weapons and units.
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
