I read the headline and thought this is just an article of crazy shit ai says, then I saw it was from Reuters and got confused. Apparently they mean ‘the ai industry’ and not ‘an ai chatbot’ is threatening the eu:
The EU wants to compete with the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence. But critics say policymakers haven’t planned for the sector’s extreme water demand.
then put the data centers where there is more water🤦
this doesn’t seem that complex at all
Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There’s been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I’ve also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they’ll run just fine even at -30C as long as they’re shielded from elements other than temperature.
And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.
Or you could just not have data centers
We are connected right now via multiple data centers.
well they do have a ton of valid use cases for stuff like drug development and training self driving cars and so forth
its not all ai ‘art’
and the internet sorta relies on them too for storing websites
Is it “great” to have microsoft or amazon data centres in Europe?
I mean, with Trump you’re even more dependent on US IT tech, aren’t you?
ai will solve this problem soon
Europe consists of a bunch of peninsulas surrounded by ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea
Water volume: 21,700 km³ (1.76×1010 acre⋅ft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Ocean
Water volume: 3,750,000 km³ (900,000 cu mi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean
Water volume: 310,410,900 km³ (74,471,500 cu mi)
EDIT: For bonus points, if one is going to expend the waste heat on evaporating seawater anyway:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/desalination-saltwater-brine-mining
In Seawater, Researchers See an Untapped Bounty of Critical Metals
The temperatures needed to boil water are not the temperatures at which to run datacenters.
You don’t need to hit boiling levels to evaporate water.
Any increase in temperature, which benefits evaporation, decreases the efficiency of running the data center.
This is the vapor pressure curve for water. Under constant pressure and saturation of the air, the evaporation rate as a function of temperature is proportional to the vapor pressure curve. As you can see it is an exponential relationship.
Now you have to offset that with the energy it takes to pump the water around, the increased costs for equipment that can deal with salt water, the increased costs to deal with flooding risks…
You know what you could do instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_evaporation_pond
All it takes is a flat basin and a dam with a gate to let in water and then block it away. The sun will do the rest.
well, that’s the cost of this amazing new technology that’s going to solve everything and change everyone innit.
I mean. Y’know. Someday. Maybe. Probably not though, but we’ve tried not destroying the earth for it and that didn’t work. What does Microsoft or OpenAI have to lose?
Is there really no european leader with a back bone
The EU has spent a fair bit of money building up compute in Spain. Not really seeing them intervening when someone else pitches in with their own money. Chances are it wouldn’t happen without the legal requirements to keep data in Europe, anyway.
Supercomputers are a different beast than AI data centres. MareNostrum uses 1.3MW, that’s peanuts and easily used up by hot showers, Barcelona has a lot of showers. It’s also only the 4th largest EuroHPC computer. Private investors apparently plan to build a Gigawatt worth of compute in Aragon.
