Sometimes I wish the Epstein class would just mass bomb all us poors already and get it over with. This slow, painful death thing is extremely annoying and stressful.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
529 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
83251 readers
3310 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I sometimes work in the building that's in the thumbnail of the article, that's crazy to see.
But that being said, data centers are definitely a negative for the environment and using them for bogus AI nonsense is horrible.
Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away, the research found, affecting more than 340 million people.
Huh?
Yea this makes the methodology super suspect.
Air and water move, especially when heated.
But un a radius of 6 mi? That sounds a bit high.
More close to a city with lots of concrete to store the heat.
Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that's equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.
Edit: and keep in mind, that's HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that's heating for over 600,000 people.
Even a large parking lot has a huge impact on how hot the surrounding area gets. But not 6+ miles away.
Sorry to nitpick but doesn't 100% of it end up as heat? Vibrations, light, sounds, radio waves- all a tiny fraction of the power are also eventually absorbed by the environment.
That was my understanding at least
Yeah but will that happen in the 6M radius that we are talking about?
No, it'll all happen inside the data center. The problem with that is computers hate all that heat, so they pipe it all away and dump it outside to the best of their ability. The data center may not be 6 miles wide, but then the wind starts blowing the heat around. Hell, even on a perfectly still day, heat would radiate out. They're making enough heat to keep every single home in a city of 500,000+ people comfortable in winter, so it's either that or the data center turns into the world's largest oven.
My understanding is that some tiny portion, like 1-2%, is actually used in a meaningful way to do calculations to do what you want, but that could incorrect. Or it may be that that tiny portion still inevitably turns to heat, just indirectly somehow. I'm not sure, though, you could be right.
How did you go from 10% to 1-2%? Please don’t use such precise figures when the source is clearly your ass.
All of the energy that does calculations gets turned into heat. The only energy that doesn't get directly turned into heat is the mechanical energy produced by the fans (which ends up turning into heat), and the electromagnetic radiation (which also ends up turning into heat).
If the calculations didn't convert energy into heat, a computer would essentially use no power. You can think of a computer like a really complex wire. The power consumption you see is actually the heat loss of that wire. The less heat you lose, the more efficient the wire is.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The graphs in the paper show the temperature 1 km away from the data center being 8°C higher and attribute that to heat emitted by the data center. That should start the alarm bells that something isn't right with this paper.
Here's a post going into the problems with it;
If that 16° in foreign members or freedom units?
Lol I thought Celsius, would've been hell. It's in Farenheit
That's still ~9°C, which is a lot.
Mini hell
Just need 1 km wide copper heatsinks
Where do you think the heat from that heatsink eventually goes? The only way to get "rid" of it is into the air or the water.
Woosh!
Sorry, I did not catch onto your expertly crafted joke.
Coming to a neighborhood near you, bringing the noise, heat, and higher electric bills.
Funnily enough, it looks like most data centers are built near mini-mansion neighborhoods.
Kinda nice seeing the affluent class have to deal with infrastructure being built at their expense.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Years ago, I was driving through NY city-ish. We pulled over in a rest area and I saw a sign about turning your engine off. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, as did many other people apparently as their cars were idling. Then I got out of my car. I was wrong. The heat was insane. I couldn’t wrap my little head around it. I started doing the engineer math thing because it didn’t make sense.
Doesn’t surprise me at all these massive data centers are creating little heat domes. The cars were bad enough, and they are a fraction of the energy.
load more comments
(24 replies)
I'm not sure what you guys are worried about. All that extra heat will just dissipate into the atmosphere and eventually radiate into space. It's not like there's anything in the atmosphere that would interfere with this cycle... right?
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›