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| ▲ | hunterpayne 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Luckily AI data centers produce nowhere near that amount of heat. Remember the heat is waste and 300 MWh is the total draw. Some of that energy becomes heat. That ratio is somewhere like 100:1 though. Also, the waste water is only like 10F hotter than the intake. We build GW sized PP all the time and they will leak far more heat (as like on the order of 100x) than a 300 MWh AI data center. Thought there were supposed to be engineers on this site. |
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| ▲ | dantillberg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Some of that energy becomes heat. I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents). Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects. | | |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 300 MW hr is approximately nothing to the broader environment. A constant gigawatt load is (off the top of my head, probably off a bit) something like 5 sq km of solar over a 24 hour period on average. Granted some of that light would otherwise be reflected but that gets us in the rough ballpark. In local terms its a fair bit of heating but zooming out it's a drop in the bucket. |
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| ▲ | abigail95 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yeah it gets radiated into space |
