Insights

Why do data centers love deserts?

In so many ways, data center water use is more intensive than the way an ordinary person uses water, as Shaolei Ren explained to Reece Rogers for Wired: “The water that is available for people to use is very limited. It’s just the fresh surface water and groundwater. Those data centers, they’re just evaporating water… Read More »

Data center water scam

Data gets hot. Computer servers get hot. They need to be cooled. There is a direct correlation between the amount of energy a server or data center is using and the amount of water required to keep it cool. “On average, between one to nine liters of water are evaporated during the cooling process of… Read More »

Anatomy of a data center

A data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Only worse. Super-high, aggressive security; ugly warehouse buildings. A prison will bring a decent quantity of jobs. Data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water and electricity than a prison, while also causing far… Read More »

Moore’s Law is breaking down

Chips and storage would get cheaper, faster and more powerful forever, they said. No limits. Every couple of years, Santa would arrive with twice the power at half the price. They called it Moore’s Law. For what seemed like an eternity—from the 1960s—chips were getting faster and smaller and cheaper. Then in the 2010s, things… Read More »

When does Silicon Valley begin?

What goes around does eventually come around. The outsourcing of harm and the pursuit of the very cheapest labor was too wildly successful for Silicon Valley. By the 2020s, China was rising and nearly all the best chips were made in Taiwan. Security and dominance fears grew and a major push began to bring back… Read More »

The future is bright green

According to tech futurists like Gregory Stock, the only function biodiversity had was to entertain humans. “There is an immense roster of species,” he noted, “that neither affect nor interest the vast majority of humankind.” This was in 1999 and these tech bro views have only accelerated and hardened since then as, unsurprisingly, biodiversity has… Read More »

The anti-Nature Valley

It worked, and like a magic trick, the digital warmonger was born and boomed as something greener, something softer. However, impressions cause reality distortions. By keeping things low and out of sight, urban sprawl spread faster than anywhere else in the United States. Those low-lying ‘campuses’ grew everywhere as the Valley experienced almost exponential growth,… Read More »

Silicon Valley: designing for invisibility

“A lot of that design was about deliberately placing industrial infrastructure out of sight,” scientist Josh Lepawsky explained to me. “Literally putting it underground. Things like chemical storage tanks needed to store the chemicals for the manufacturing process. So, it was a deliberate urban design process, and I think it has been with us since… Read More »

The greenwashing of Silicon Valley

It wasn’t always known as the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. Once upon a time, they called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From far and near, families would come on Springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours” in Santa Clara Valley, California. “Miles and miles of fragrant orchards, spreading in a vista… Read More »

It takes coal and charcoal to make silicon

That silicon stuff. Sand, right? Right. It takes coal and charcoal, multiple metals and materials, and over 400 toxic chemicals, to make a silicon chip—the foundation of everything that happens in clean tech. “The environmental impact of chip making is huge,” Ian Williams, professor of applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, told Mongabay.… Read More »