Evaporative chillers are not necessary to cool a data center, certainly not in Michigan. We chill data centers in Arizona with no water usage at all. The data center designers / owners are just being cheap. Sure, if you can get the local municipality to give you water you can use that to lower your costs and increase your efficiency. But it's not necessary. All our data centers use 100% renewable power (if not available then we purchase credits), and we cool with air chillers, and despite these additional costs we're certainly not going bankrupt or being left with unsold capacity.

It's (as always) about the money. The fact that they are going ahead with the project anyway tells me that they will just switch to air chillers.

To directly respond to your comment (which is spot-on), a new facility being stood up for LANL is likely to be direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Generally we don't do full immersion because of the costs and complexity (a modern AI 52U rack is pushing 5000lbs now and fully immersing it will put additional structural strain on the slab floor), but the technology to distribute chilled water from the facility through CDUs (coolant distribution units) to manifolds in the racks and then directly to the chips needing to be cooled is finally getting mature.

About 40 years ago a friend of mine stated that this problem had been solved and that slow motion photography proved that the cat used its tail to right itself. I actually had a tailless cat nearby (lost it in an accident with a car) which I retrieved, held out in front of him about two feet off the ground, and let go. It landed on its feet.

What's curious is how long this has been "studied" and how many different theories there have been!

Trump is looking for an AI company that is headed by someone who either has far too much confidence, or far too little regard for human life.

Surprise! That ended up being Sam Altman.

I own the intellectual property for the software by the name of Amiga Flow from the '80s. So both party's argument about prior art or use can get stuffed.

You can find the source code to Amiga Flow here.

Wankers.

I can't speak to all of the areas that contribute to AI backlog (like capital allocation, systems integration, networking availability, etc). But from a data centre standpoint it is a real struggle. The general timeline to get from requirements to signature on a data centre lease is about three months if all goes well (assuming you are not self-performing). Once that is signed a DC project takes about two years from conception to RFS (ready-for-service) where you can start rolling in racks. A LOT goes into that timeframe: Ordering LLE (Long-Lead Equipment (generators have a 24+ month lead time right now)), securing permits, securing power, securing a EOR (Engineer of Record) and getting the design done, land preparation, construction crews and materials, etc.

And that is all just to get a "powered shell": what we call a building with at least two diverse sources of utility power, gens, transformers, power switch gear, static UPSs (if they are being used), chillers, pumps and piping, etc. You still can't roll in racks until you have a fit-out design (PDUs, RPPs, whips, busway, FWUs (Fan Wall Units) or CRAHs (Computer Room Air Handlers), temp and humidity sensors, etc. It takes about a YEAR from the time you get the fit-out design to the time when you can roll in racks (but it is possible to line up fit-out works with RFS if you get the design early enough).

Everybody is looking for some creative solutions to speed things up, but data centre deployments are complex (I deal with well over 1000 individual requirements per project) and there are a lot of supply chain constraints. Most of the hyperscalers are juggling 20+ simultaneous projects, it's burning people out and there is a lot of churn in the business (making it worse).

The Trump administration just pushed out the official who's unit banned Chinese vehicles.

"Jan 23 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has pushed out a Commerce Department official whose office effectively barred nearly all Chinese cars from the U.S. market for national security reasons, according to people familiar with the matter."

"The sources said that, had she not resigned, Cannon would have been reassigned, and that the new administration plans to put a political appointee in the post. Her last day is expected to be February 20, two people said."

Why this is happening is anyone's guess.

I think this may be the first time I've seen a dupe immediately following the duplicated story. Unless there is something remarkable about Trump announcing something before the company involved gets a chance to comment on it.

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name. But once again our language has been co-opted by marketing BS and now here we are trying to set the record straight so people aren't confused or deceived.

The most useful feature for the same people who use text messaging and emergency services when they are outside of a cell coverage area is a local weather forecast. Something that the Garmin In-Reach family of devices do, and really the only thing an avid hiker / paddler / outdoors person is missing from the Apple service that can be a matter of life or death.

Years ago I owned a highly renovated one room brick schoolhouse (ground-source geothermal heat pump, radiant floor heating, two stories). The attic was cooled with a power vent (at some temp (I think it was like 115f) a central fan would come on and push hot air through a single top vent and pull it up through the eves). In the summer almost every afternoon when it was sunny you could hear the power vent come on.

About 10 years into ownership I installed a metal roof with a slate-like look. The company claimed that the roof would make the schoolhouse more energy efficient by reflecting a lot of the incoming solar heat. Well, the power vent *never* came on again in the 3 years after I installed the roof. At one point I even checked to make sure it was still working. In fact the A/C would only come on maybe a couple of times per summer instead of almost every day.

The install cost was about double what shingles would be, but next time I have to install a roof I'm doing the same thing. These things have a lifetime non-prorated warranty unlike shingles which are prorated. I don't have the house anymore and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way.

The problems with underwater data centres are: Cost to build a facility at scale that can exist underwater (pressurization, leak detection, etc). Inconvenience of access for operational maintenance and repair. Cost to mitigate against corrosive salt water in your chilled water loops and pumps. Damage to marine ecosystems and the effects of warming localized water. Etc.

We keep trying to do it because the siren song of almost unlimited free cooling is such a draw. A PUE of 1.15 is very impressive, but you can get a PUE of 1.35 in Arizona with only air-cooled chillers (so not consuming any water). Microsoft famously experimented with this from 2018 to 2020 and claimed it as a success due to a low failure rate (they filled the container with nitrogen before submerging), but AFAIK have done nothing since.

I don't know who Gil Luria is or how good he is at his job, but that statement is very misleading. All hyperscalers, including Oracle, use third party data center providers.

How it works: Companies like NVidia and OpenAI have partners. So let's say you're a medium-sized company ($500M+ market cap) and you want to deploy some machine learning capability. You go to NVidia and say "I'd like to purchase 5 of your GB300 liquid-cooled racks. NVidia says "Excellent, do you have a service provider for those?" Then they have a list of recommended and certified partners who can provide the racks pre-built in a data center where they have the care and feeding (and power and plumbing) they need. Oracle is a partner.

None of the big hyperscalers can build and run their own facilities fast enough so they all use third parties to get additional capacity. All of them. Including, and especially Oracle. So that customer with the 5 racks may find themselves in an "Oracle" data center which is actually owned and operated by Switch or CyrusOne, or NTT Data, or Iron Mountain, or DRT.

The comments by Luria make no sense (to me).

It's data centres. For the past decade and even through the pandemic-era surge in data centre demand the hyperscale providers have been pushing for 100% renewable energy solutions. That changed last year with the ramp-up of AI demand. In the US the utility providers are really struggling to provide anywhere near the power that is being requested. I've got campuses that will only get 10-20MW in the next year and then have to wait 3+ years for any additional capacity and I wont be at all surprised if any dates I have now will slip as they get closer. There is literally NO POWER.

The fastest and easiest way to lots of cheap power is gas. There are so many projects going on right now where a provider has bought huge tracts of land in Texas, and is simultaneously building a gas power plant and a data centre campus capable of 200+MW of IT load. And if you build the redundancy into your gas plant you can save $100s of millions on diesel generators.

"But, but solar is cheaper and clean, etc" Yes, but it doesn't work at night. So you need batteries. Lots of expensive batteries. Imagine the amount of batteries you'd need to provide 200MW of power for 8+ hours. It doesn't work.

"But then just grid tie the solar!" Sounds good. But for that you need a power supply and use agreement with a utility and that takes time and money and most utilities will want to own/operate the generation facility. Building the power transmission infrastructure to your 500ac campus in BFE Texas is not a cheap walk-in-the-park either. Half of all my delays are just getting the power *to* the site.

That is why ALL of these companies are silently backing away from their climate pledges. For the record, my company has not and will not back away from our climate pledges. We've been 100% renewable for years and will continue to be.

This guy is pretty dry, but he does a good job of breaking down what these are, how they work and the challenges with them. TLDR: You don't own the security, the token creator does (Robinhood, etc) with just a promise to pay you if they sell their positions. You don't get to collect dividends of any equity, etc.

I don't know if this guy has been on vacation or living under a rock, but there was already a correction last month. Microsoft dropped 2GW worth of DC leases (on top of the several hundred MW they did in Feb) which flooded the market with inventory. Two of my customers immediately dropped out of work that was being done on other data centers because they knew they would be able to pick up space sooner and for less money as a result. Everybody in the industry saw a pull-back. Where we were working on designing and selling inventory that was 24 months out now nobody wants to talk about anything that is further than 12 months away from being ready.

Tying new data centers to old nuclear plants has a whole host of other issues around it that make me think this will end up being a nothing burger (SMRs are another matter), but this supposed irrationality of a capital system working as intended seems ill conceived.