I feel like dumping “waste” heat is the same as burning off “waste” gas from pumping oil.
It’s not really just a waste byproduct, there just isn’t a profitable way to utilize it. That heat could be used, but we just dump it into the ocean or the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than building municipal heating or recycling it for industrial uses.
China’s already doing this with nuclear, so there’s a good chance they might do this with data centers too. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-commercial-nuclear-district-heating-scheme-expands
I heard about that! Heat from data centers is harder, unfortunately, because the amount of waste heat generated by a nuclear reactor is far higher than the amount generated by a data center. With smaller quantities of heat come greater costs to recuperate it, at least until they link all the waste-heat sources up into a single network that can collect from multiple data centers.
China is moving fast, though. I bet we’ll see some kind of project like this before the bubble pops in the US.
indeed
Boiling the ocean like the Microsoft underwater cloud servers
The fact of the matter is that air is an incredibly inefficient thermal conductor so data centers have to burn a massive amount of extra electricity just to run powerful fans and chillers to force that heat away. That extra energy consumption means an air cooled facility is responsible for generating significantly more total heat for the planet than a liquid cooled one.
When you put servers in the ocean you utilize the natural thermal conductivity of water which is about 24 times higher than air and allows you to strip out the active cooling infrastructure entirely. You end up with a system that puts far less total energy into the environment because you aren’t wasting power fighting thermodynamics. Even though the ocean holds that heat longer the volume of water is so vast that the local temperature impact dissipates to nothing within a few meters of the vessel.
Microclimate will still be altered around these data centres
🙄
The rate they are in increasing energy demand might have the planet boiling within 10 years.
😶
seems like the opposite is happening in practice with models drastically increasing in efficiency
You’ll have to watch carefully the number to look at is total energy consumption.
Feel free to explain why people’s energy bills and my energy demand from data centers slated grow exponentially
The fallacy here is the assumption that if LLMs didn’t exist then we wouldn’t find other ways to use that power.
That’s not a fallacy. REDUCE, reuse, recycle. We shouldn’t be looking for new ways to consume more energy or celebrating massive infrastructure projects to power chat bots. The project is cool though
Yes, it is a fallacy because the problem is with the economy system as opposed to a specific technology. The liberal tendency often defaults to a form of procedural opposition such as voting against, boycotting, or attempting to regulate a problem out of existence without seizing the means to effect meaningful change. It’s an idealist mindset that mistakes symbolic resistance for tangible action. Capitalism is a a system based around consumption, and it will continue to use up resources at an accelerating rate regardless of what specific technology is driving the consumption.
@yogthos@lemmy.ml @fantasyocean@lemmy.dbzer0.com well it’s actually China that is using by far the most fossil fuels in the world. US has the largest AI build-out, China is second place. And don’t insult the Chinese by calling them capitalist please.
That’s just saying that China is one of the most populous countries in the world that also happens to be a global manufacturing hub. China still uses fossil fuels, but I think it’s fair to call it an electrostate at this point.
- China’s carbon emissions have been in a structural decline since 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year
- Clean energy was top driver of China’s economic growth in 2023 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-was-top-driver-of-chinas-economic-growth-in-2023/
- China installed more solar in 2025 than rest of the world combined https://electrek.co/2025/09/02/h1-2025-china-installs-more-solar-than-rest-of-the-world-combined/
- China’s solar capacity surges; predicted to top 1 TW by 2026 https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-surges-expected-to-top-1-tw-by-2026
- China is also building out nuclear at a breakneck pace https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building-nuclear-reactors-faster-than-any-other-country
- New energy vehicles account for 77.6% of China’s public transport system https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2403089981/
Finally, it’s also worth noting that China has a concrete plan for becoming carbon neutral, which it’s already ahead of
