925
This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.
Also a good showcase on why you should care about your local elections. Vote for people who will protect your interests, like these folks.
Remember that time that Microsoft sunk a data center in the ocean, proved this was cost effective, was reliable and could scale? And now it's been five years and nothing happened? Yeah that was annoying.
Anyway their site of glowing press releases is still up for some reason
It worked well until there was a component failure, requiring a whole farm to be taken down to replace said failed components. This is why they dropped the project.
They didn't think of that when designing this?
What do you think research is?
I'm sure they did, and they wouldn't take the farm down until there was X% failure, but the amount of time and effort it took to perform those repairs made it unfeasible.
I guess that , unlike some famous people in "Phoenix Valley", the people in Tucson did not forget "the white man's greed".
Kudos to them!
Good. This whole thing was stupid when the local government and utilities keep telling us little people to conserve water because, well we're in a 113 degree desert with a complete lack of water due to climate change and they wanted to do this bullshit.
Have you tried collecting the condensation off the glass? If you use that to wash your armpits you can go an extra day before you shower so Jeff Bezos can make numbers go up in his theoretical money.
Edit: "Comical" thought. There is less than $2.5 trillion in cash circulating.
That wouldn't cover 20 people net worth in a country of near 350,000,000.
Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.
I doubt a microchip that doesn't need cooling, while still calculating reasonably fast, is possible.
It's possible if you make it a macrochip instead of a microchip.
heat-resistant microchips
Wat
Yeah, man, Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds! He could support the development of something that breaks the fundamental rules of physics EASILY!
He can go develop me a liquid nitro cooling setup.
Use so many fans he can power a wind farm
Shove his servers up his bum
Honestly i'm fine with any of the above
Computers use electricity to do math. The more electricity you have, the more math you can do. In order to do the math, the electricity is handled in a way that outputs heat. Unfortunately, the most reliable, cost effective and plentiful materials that allow electricity to do a lot of math also get heavily impacted by heat.
modern cpus has an energy density on par with nuclear power plant cores.
they need cooling, money cant break physics.
Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
It's not their water, so they don't care. When it finally runs out, they'll just go somewhere else.
I mean, sure, that's their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there's no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build
That's someone else's problem. Hopefully someone after they're dead, but as long as they have their golden parachute, who cares?
They're locusts. They don't think about anything past the next fiscal quarter.
True but this isn't specific to the tech bubble. It's a feature of capitalism. Competition forces firms to adopt shorter term horizons. If a firm has significant profit to make by focusing on the short term and it does not, its competitor would. If the profit possoble within this period is significant, having the competitor collect it runs the risk of the current firm failing, or the competitor accumulating enough for hostile takeover, among other failures. That would stop the current firm onwer from collecting profits in the future. Even if focusing on the long term is more profitable over time, firms may not survive in a competitive environment to realize long term profits. These are some of the fundamental processes that drive firms into short term horizons. With liquid asset markets there are even more immediate processes driving firms into short term planning.
Add to that planning based mainly on prices, which don't capture a ton of reality and you get situations like a water hungry datacenter in the desert, cause the price of water does not capture its long term availability for example.
All of this has happened in the past, even a century ago. It's happened and keeps happening in other industries too. For example the fossil fuel industry.
That's more an artifact of modern corporate structure where a publicity traded entity must always be growing or it will be considered a failure.
That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?
Low humidity. Good for longevity of electronics, and makes the evaporative cooling more efficient. So it’s a matter of the benefits of that vs. the cost of the added heat.
Land is also relatively cheap.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
load more comments
(6 replies)
its also colder at night, because the desert doesnt retain heat much? in places like vegas its hot, because the asphalt and concrete absorbs heat.
load more comments
(16 replies)
Why are data centers so thirsty anyway? Can't cooling systems just reuse water in a closed loop?
Evaporative cooling needs less water mass and less surface area for the same cooling effect. They could simply use bigger heat sinks outside the building and have a bigger water cooling system to make it closed loop, but they don't want to do that.
load more comments
(2 replies)
They absolutely can run closed loop. It does not cool as well as evaporative cooling (it takes MASSIVE heat to evaporate water) but it can work if designed right with large system capacity and big radiators. Trouble is it's likely more expensive than pissing away the water and we know all that matters is bottom line.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Well fine, guess I'll have to make my obese fart videos the old fashioned way. Anyone seen my kimchi?
Amazon have how many data centers and they wanna be building more? Greedy cunts
We could simply stop using amazon services and they won't be build anymore.
Good luck using the internet while avoiding AWS
I swear I didn’t asked for this bloated fucking mess. The whole internet could’ve been optimized to 10% of whatever it is today but we’re trying to run ReactJS now in the backend instead.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yup, just takes a single person!
Clearly I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and checks notes change how large portions of the Internet get their compute.
I'm gonna use up all the fresh water just popping down to the data center for some AWS compute time, as a treat.
load more comments
(8 replies)
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
925 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
73758 readers
3496 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS