Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116334729524665446

I'm just a touch skeptical about the claims here. I can believe that large data centers may raise temperatures around them, but the claim about raising nearby temperatures up to 16.4F and that the changes could be felt up to 3.3 miles away.

To be clear, I'm not questioning the concept that data centers may raise temperatures -- I'm just a bit skeptical about the, no pun intended, degree of the changes.

However, I do think we should be hard applying the brakes on building new data centers, etc., to study their environmental impacts before just blindly building out more.

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Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@jzb this is indeed an interesting question. Consider this: Russian city of Ekaterinburg (pop 1.5M, 1100 sq km, harsh winters) uses city-wide heating with the capacity of about 6800 Gcal/h if I am to believe the Wikipedia. That is roughly 7.9 GW. The largest DC in Europe back in 2024 was 1.2 GW (all of which goes into heat). I'm not sure if the heat from a DC is indeed enough to raise the temperatures around the DC by a large factor, but it surely is enough to keep tens of thousands of European homes warm, so the claim from the article/the paper doesn't sound too outlandish to me.

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Joe Brockmeier

@nina_kali_nina Thanks. I will take a look at that paper.

I hope I conveyed well enough that I'm not trying to refute the study, etc., but I'm just raising an eyebrow about the magnitude. A little bit.

This is just one more objection to the rampaging, blind adoption of LLMs...