I have been working in data centers for decades. You have no idea the amount of waste there is. We fill up roll away dumpsters w/ boxes/packing materials when a new customer comes in.
They do an upgrade, ever server/switch/router etc ends up in the dumpster. Even if they are perfectly good and it isn’t worth shipping back or they have devalued to zero so they cannot be sold for tax purposes. Oh and another round of boxes/packing materials in the dumpster.
Some customers demand proof we destroy their servers (not drives). So we record one of us on a fork truck running over hundreds of servers. That part is kinda fun.
Areas uninsulated w/ AC blasting. Machines running that are idle as backup to the backup.
On paper we recycle them, but most of the time they end up in a landfill.
or they have devalued to zero so they cannot be sold for tax purposes.
Well that’s just stupid. In my country, if you sell property that’s been depreciated to zero (or lower than its sale price in general), you’re just supposed to record it as profit.
Of course when you’ve depreciated something to zero and it’s not something like a car where it’s registered with the government, you could just give it away to employees or friends.
Technically they can do the same but its not worth the hassle. I could have been more clear on that in my OP.
Case in point, we had a large HVAC fail. They wanted it hauled to the land fill. I thought what a waste, I’ll cut it up and take the condensers/copper to the scrappers and get a bunch of money and send it to HQ. I was already on the clock doing nothing and hoped to my us look good.
Cut it up in less than an hour, took to the scrapper on my time on my way home. Walked out with a fist full of cash and the receipt. Deposited the cash and wrote a check for the amount I got and sent it to finance.
I got is so much trouble for that. Finance didn’t want to deal w/ the paperwork. They went to their exec to complain to my exec and it was a shit show. Basically I was told we are a multi billion dollar corp and these small checks aren’t worth the labor to deal with.
As for “giving it away” you would be fired by COB if they found out. Especially over 3rd party gear. Liability was their biggest concern. I have posted a few examples in other reply’s.
Is it stupid, it is, I totally agree. But its incentivized to take the path of least resistance.
That seems like the perfect department slush fund. Free cookies every friday! Bigger christmas party!
We were allowed to do that w/ scrap cabling/metal and such. But like everything someone had to push it and start recycling new wire to keep the pizzas flowing. Bean counters noticed the spike in cable being purchased. Asked the bosses why so much going out w/ no new projects. Bosses figured out who it was and they were fired. The bean counters we had watched all the numbers like hawks. I got questioned on why the mowing company was billing 20% than last year w/ no contract increase. We are talking maybe a couple grand. I had to put the mowers on a schedule to keep the costs where they wanted regardless of the rain/growth.
someone had to push it and start recycling new wire to keep the pizzas flowing
ffs, someone always has to ruin a good thing.
The problem is, few employees or friends will want an enterprise grade server screaming in their house.
The waste described above makes me sad. Surely parts of servers can be recycled.
Another good point, I swear they get louder and louder… The last batch of new servers sounded like a 777 on takeoff.
The amount of waste out there like this is tragic. I could understand destroying hard drives, but the rest of the hardware?
If you saw it when we had to destroy on site it would make you cry. 60’ of servers in 2 rows and we would roll a forklift over them. The most we did was 3 sets of rows in a day.
Climate damage related to AI workloads could exceed $50 billion by 2030
It’s a sad state of affairs that even when talking of extinction level threat, it is still quantified in monetary terms. Unsurprising, considering it’s written by Allianz.
“Do you know how much money our investors will lose if the human race goes extinct???”
The current investors are hoping to be rich enough to have their own compound by the time the climate catastrophe gets that bad. By the time they lose money, it will be fairly meaningless. This is why I’ve always hated measuring climate damage in dollars - we can’t measure real world catastrophe against a societal construct
My estimates show that climate damage of data centers will cost more money than is on Earth! Spread the news…
People have the memory of a gold fish when it comes to anything long term, so they just vote against their best interest again because they’re incapable of connecting the dots.
They understand money to some extent though, but even at that scale, not as much.
At the current rate of increase, half the country will be homeless in ten years. I don’t think people this greedy use their brains at all.
I would change the title to “Data centers emitting more CO2 than claimed”
And some people think AI could help solve climate change…
It has shown that there’s enough money around we could just tax it and solve our problems collectively. Not sure which height of tax rate would be as devastating for the economy as a bursting AI bubble.
Answer: stop-poll-ut-tingHint: Satire
Breathe less 💁
It can! We just need to train a few more models. I’m sure we’ll find one that comes up with the solution!
/s
I think it was a black mirror episode, but might have been something else, where civilization as we know it is gone, but the fully automated mega factories are still running.
AI: 2154 We’ve solved climate change for real!
Global Human Population: 125,000
The answer is 42.
In a sense, we are already at that point. Well… maybe not solve it, but at least slow it down. And maybe not help, but be part of the solution. And that solution is to shut it down.
Killing all humans would solve climate change pretty quickly.
Quick! Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for pie!
I still do not understand why they don’t use heat exchange loops, like we figured out for nukes 75 years ago
I’d assume it’s cheaper to fuck up the environment.
Because it’s considerably cheaper to do it this way and they’re being allowed to do so. Why would they spend money building giant cooling towers when they can just dump the hot water into the river and then drain main supply for fresh supply.
It’s as the case is with everything for these parasites: if it loses them too much money or makes them too little, they avoid it like the plague. It’s cheaper upfront to just run it through an open system.
They usually do. They just do the same thing a lot of nuclear reactors do and also evaporatively cool one end of the heat exchange loop.
As far as I can see they don’t ever do it that way, that’s the problem, if it was a closed loop they wouldn’t be pulling water from the mains and causing water pressure issues for everybody else.
They cool the hot side of the loop with running water, like reactors do, rather than using air.
So the loop is closed, but they’re using running water to cool it off faster, rather than needing a bigger radiator on the hot side.
That’s not what they’re doing though. That would be fine that’s just a heat exchanger.
What they are doing is pulling water from the mains to cool the system either directly or to cool an internal system via heat exchanger and then are dumping hot water back into the environment. They’re not pumping the water to cooling ponds and letting it cool back down and then pulling the water back out of the cooling ponds to use again.
I was thinking more along the lines of the big evaporative cooling towers you see with a lot of reactors, since they rely on vaporisation to cool off, most of that water can’t be reused, short of getting picked up in the water cycle again.
Hmmm can they … add a turbine?
Unfortunately not. Computing hardware doesn’t get that hot.
The chips would be fried if you had them at the temperatures where they were generating enough steam to run a turbine.
The people who thought data centers bad sides weren’t that bad for the environment are the same people who thought Epstein Island was just a nice place for boats to stop for lunch.
Than thought? No. Ill wager they knew.
I thought for a second they’re emitting CO2, it’s their footprint or the grids energy sources
“Marking ones own homework” is a translation of a proverb in my own language which I found fitting here
You’re going to get scolded over the carbon impact of streaming tv.
“286 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025” wow literally nothing.
Oh, how very unexpected
Obviously this is bad, but there is definitely some irony in the fact that if the government and all the evil lobbyists that are pushing these data centers would have significantly less issues if they’d actually invested in clean energy earlier like we were all already asking them to years ago.
But instead all that BS about “clean coal” is coming back to bite them in the foot now that they actually want to use that “clean” energy
…or cared to admit til caught