Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water with the waste heat. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water with the waste heat. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
Or build in cold climates where they could use geothermal for power and naturally cold air to bring the temps down.
I hear land in Detroit is cheap. As is Northern Canada.
Detroit is not cold in summer. And places that are cold year round are running into issues from global warming and permafrost (I don’t understand the issue, but they exist) without adding local heat.
The main issue with permafrost is instability. If you build on permafrost, when it melts you’ll lose everything that’s not anchored to bedrock. Imagine the ground 3ft below the surface of your street suddenly collapsing, like a sinkhole. At the very least that would ruin the road, the water and sewer pipes, the electricitu and telecom lines, etc. Melting permafrost also releases A LOT of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. (Runaway global warning, anyone?) Lastly, after the permafrost melts, the soil that is left isn’t necessarily suitable for agriculture: it washes away easily and is prone to waterlogging.
Of course, these challenges can be overcome with time and money. It might become worth doing once the current arable land turn into deserts. But the scope of it is huge. We’ll have to invent a whole new type of agriculture.
Detroit is still colder than the Southern US, where many of these data centers are currently being built. Lots of empty land in northern Wyoming and Idaho as well.
Central/south Idaho is where the land is, a lot of it is volcanic rock, and the north is forest/mountains all day, so… less ideal than you might think.
Also no real internet trunks go through the area, so you’d have that to fix too.