You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawnmower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fans echoed through the air. A growing body… Read More »

Big Tech’s vaunted data center energy efficiency gains were not what they seemed. Despite substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much after that. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta more than doubled their energy demand between 2017 and 2021. Driven by AI, emissions figures from data centers were expected to double,… Read More »

For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for our environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more power than all… Read More »

Using a slew of aliases to buy land and make sweet deals, getting secret, historic tax breaks, getting electricity at less than half of what ordinary people pay, being sold public land for less than half the market value, slurping down the cheapest of cheap water like there’s no tomorrow, this is how Big Tech… Read More »

The total amount consumed by Big Tech could be much, much higher than what they nominally disclose. “When it comes to water, Big Tech only shows its direct water consumption, while hiding its real water footprint,” Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, told me. Based on… Read More »

There is a reason why Big Tech has been so super-secretive about its water use. It’s because it was getting it so cheap that it wasn’t even worth measuring it. Water was this invisible externality, and because it was invisible to the public, Big Tech could keep telling the story of how it was becoming… Read More »

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 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 »

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 »

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 »