Aluminum conductors are dangerous unless the entire system is designed for it. It is not a case of switching to something cheaper.

Look at the electrical fires of the 1950’s and 1960’s as an example, and that was at household levels of current.

Aluminum is used, but everything accounts for the insane coefficient of linear expansion and other annoying properties.

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greggyb 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would imagine most large-scale data center construction projects will include electrical engineers to design the electrical subsystem. A rack's floor footprint is a few square feet. You can put several million dollars of hardware into that rack. A data center will have at least a few racks. It's a very reasonable investment to bring someone in to do electrical design.

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knollimar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This isn't true at all unless you narrowly dwfine "the entire system".

Each feeder can be aluminum if you put special goop on any copper connections. Breakers accept it just fine, etc.

You should avoid it for smaller wiring, though. There's special 8000 series aluminum if you're trying to be serious with Al feeders

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amluto 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The goop is generally considered to be unnecessary. What you need is a termination that is rated for aluminum wire, and these are very, very common as long as the wire in question is fairly large (8AWG or so and larger).

	▲	knollimar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I only put it in the comment since the commenters here seemed uninformed. It's better to be safe and follow specs; it's more when you're doing some compound splice where it makes sense. I figure it'll make more people feel easy about it if there's a preventative measure