Jerry 🦙💝🦙While talking about datacenters and power with my youngest son, who’s an economist at a construction services company, I had the most brilliant trillion dollar idea: natural gas powered fuel cells in place of server power supplies. Instead of those super problematic power cords and PDUs and whatnot, there’s just a gas line running over the cabinets with some flexible gas line running to the back of each server. This is going to be great!
Paul D. Ouderkirk@jerry I support this plan to burn down datacenters
Artemis
bituur esztreym@jerry
really awsome. can't see what could go wrong
really awsome. can't see what could go wrong
Nonya Bidniss@jerry Uhh I have questions...but no, on second thought, this is the perfect idea for data centers actually
Siguza
lachlan slowly taming rust@jerry You just invented the missing link from "Electricity" to "Star Trek Style Explosions From Computer Consoles"
Remember us here on masto when you patent it and become the worlds second trillionaire.
Simon ZerafaI can see manifold problems with this approach, not the least being leaking gas manifolds 😉
Nazani@jerry Why stop there, all those Flock cameras should be oil or gas powered. Solar is too woke!
Mike Fraser@jerry What happens when there's a gas leak? Shut down the whole DC? Also how does fire suppression work? Ihave a lot of other questions but those two sound like deal breakers.
Random Damage 🌻@jerry How about microturbines?
At one per rack you can set them up to provide direct power, and the best part is that you can set them up to run on liquid fuels, too!
That way you can maximize uptime, and burn all the fossil fuels
@RandomDamage you’re right - maybe high pressure steam lines to micro turbines in the power suppliers
Bob Young
SpaceLifeFormAnd then feed the hot air to the server next door running an AI/LLM. They are always looking for input.
Muro deGrizecoI recall some fellows with the idea of a rack-mount hydrogen fuel cell for a UPS. I mean, and they had money to try out their mad ideas.
@murodegrizeco my time working at an electroplater taught me that there’s probably not a feasible path to hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen is an insidious little atom. Maybe materials science has come up with sometime since then but it causes so many issues with metals
Oh, it was just the total wackadoodle dangerous nature of the idea, piping nice flamable hydrogen from tanks around inside a data center.
There are a bunch of ideas like that, weird outlandish ideas, that make little sense on careful consideration, but capture the imagination!
@murodegrizeco I have long hypothesized an idea to protect data on servers that are under attack. My original idea was to put airbag behind each of the hard drives that would detonate in the event of an attack, rendering the data inaccessible. But having a source of hydrogen would open up all new possibilities
Back when we used more CD media, there was a linux command "eject" that you could run and the CD would eject.
It was mildly amusing to imagine that one could run the command with hard disks as the arguments, and the drive sleds would each pop out and fall to the floor of the server room.
Ash@jerry I could've sworn this was already being done in Texas, and lo and behold...
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2025/11/12/chevron-selects-west-texas-for-first-ai-data-center-power-project/
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2025/11/12/chevron-selects-west-texas-for-first-ai-data-center-power-project/
Moritz Dietz@jerry omg hahahahaha
Jason Bell@jerry better than the grass related conversations we have
@Maliciousspawn I have learned so much about baseball from you that I hadn’t learned in the previous 50 years of watching baseball. Lots more than grass going on.