Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems

  • shagie@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if international waters is their end goal. Self-reliant, off-grid data centers that only abide by MS rules.

    Reduction of power requirements.

    https://dataspan.com/blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use/

    For many data centers, the cooling system is one of the most energy-intensive components in the facility. The average data center cooling system consumes about 40% of the center’s total power.

    Further reading:

    From nrel.gov (National Renewable Energy Lab) site:

    When the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) was conceived, NREL set an aggressive requirement that its data center achieve an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06 or better. Since the facility opened, this goal has been met every year—and the data center has now achieved an annualized PUE rating of 1.036.

    Studies show a wide range of PUE values for data centers, but the overall average tends to be around 1.8. Data centers focusing on efficiency typically achieve PUE values of 1.2 or less. PUE is the ratio of the total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.

    (I wanna say that 1.036 for PUE is amazing - but all the stuff they did to get there is expensive)