We need datacenters to enable all the Internet stuff. If you buy stuff online, binge TV shows, or rot your brain on social media, your phone is communicating with some back-end server in “the cloud”. And the cloud is all in datacenters now, because they are all connected to the Internet, and each other. So if you want to host an Internet service where everyone can get to it, even if it’s just a virtual server on a cloud platform, that virtual server lives in a datacenter.
The reason it is all hitting the news now is that AI hardware takes much more power than a standard Linux server. So new hyperscalar /AI datacenters require a lot more power than older ones. And in areas without sane regulations, datacenters can go up much more quickly than new power plants can go up. So, if local governments and regulators aren’t looking that closely, new datacenters can quickly drive demand that the local utility can’t service without buying more power on the open market. And unless the datacenter is required by local regulations to pay the the higher price for that extra load, the cost is divided across all consumers.
Also, this increased power consumption inside each rack comes with additional cooling requirements. Old datacenters can make do with air cooling, but these new ones all use liquid cooling. And the cheapest way to do that is evaporative cooling, which “uses up” all the water we’ve been reading about. (There are closed-loop methods that don’t “use up” water, but they are more expensive so the datacenters don’t use it).
We need datacenters to enable all the Internet stuff. If you buy stuff online, binge TV shows, or rot your brain on social media, your phone is communicating with some back-end server in “the cloud”. And the cloud is all in datacenters now, because they are all connected to the Internet, and each other. So if you want to host an Internet service where everyone can get to it, even if it’s just a virtual server on a cloud platform, that virtual server lives in a datacenter.
The reason it is all hitting the news now is that AI hardware takes much more power than a standard Linux server. So new hyperscalar /AI datacenters require a lot more power than older ones. And in areas without sane regulations, datacenters can go up much more quickly than new power plants can go up. So, if local governments and regulators aren’t looking that closely, new datacenters can quickly drive demand that the local utility can’t service without buying more power on the open market. And unless the datacenter is required by local regulations to pay the the higher price for that extra load, the cost is divided across all consumers.
Also, this increased power consumption inside each rack comes with additional cooling requirements. Old datacenters can make do with air cooling, but these new ones all use liquid cooling. And the cheapest way to do that is evaporative cooling, which “uses up” all the water we’ve been reading about. (There are closed-loop methods that don’t “use up” water, but they are more expensive so the datacenters don’t use it).
So, really, it’s all a scaling problem. One datacenter doesn’t cause that much of a problem. But they grow in clumps, like a fungus. Dozens of datacenters in a small area can cause environmental havoc.