Genuine question: would people be less angry or the same about data centers if all the water used to cool them was taken from the ocean and desalinated?
China is putting data centers in the ocean to cool them and powering them with wind.
It’s an interesting idea, if nothing else. Not sure if it’ll be good for local marine life to have data centers warming the ocean, though.
How about the power they use, driving up prices for the rest of us? How about the destruction of the computer components market so that regular folks can’t buy an affordable computer that doesn’t suck? How about the jobs they destroy while replacing humans with computers that do inferior work? You’re missing so much about why they’re hated. They do like 10 kinds of major societal and environmental damage while only meaningfully contributing in specific contexts. Would it be better if they didn’t waste insane quantities of water? Yeah, but they’d still be terrible.
I offer instead:
One glassy gassy boi!
Hmm…idk anything abt this but maybe the salt!
Sugar keeps diesel engines from working and keep concrete from setting
The guy selling his shit to companies to build the data center is the big money winner. Those things have huge amounts of copper.
The companies building the data centers are likely owned by people with a large stake in the AI company they are building for
You’re most likely correct. I just cannot get over the rumours I heard about the gigantically huge amounts of copper they have in those data centers. Copper for the ages.
A year or 2 ago, some assholes were shooting substation in the hopes of causing major damage. Im sure data centers got a smaller version of this
Those 5 green blocks are radiators. One of those assholes shot and damage a few of the radiators at a critical substation. It caused power loss to about 7k people including schools and a hospital. The news story said they had to truck in temp substations until they got the new parts to repair. ETA was 6 months to a year.
Sorry, kinda went on a tangent. Good luck with your AI recipe that uses 5 gallons of salt or whatever.
I’m going to take this opportunity to rant about a Ukranian tactic of drone plus thermite bucket.
You can get fine aluminum and iron oxide powder online easily. A sparkler sets it off or even a superheated wire.
The Ukrainians have been having great success at using thermite to forcibly evict Russians from their trenches, and sometimes, from their mortal coils as well.
Probably a bad idea to buy it online.
How would they even remotely trigger such a device nobody should consider building?
Intellectually speaking, A strip of magnesium acting as a fuse would work, but require lighting before the trip. In practice, though, someone could get hurt, so only do this for science.
A cigarette is the classic slow-acting fuse that will give you 3-5 minutes. In college, we would hook them up to firecrackers, and then go hang out near the RA, so when it went off, we had a fool-proof alibi. The bang would destroy all evidence of the cigarette fuse.
We once set 3 at once and then were hanging in plain sight near the RA when the first one went off. We all ran to that one, and then we heard another one go off down another hall, etc. We were standing next to the RA when all of them went off. The PERFECT crime.
Can’t get away with it today, too many cameras.
Also, modern cigarettes go out on their own if not consistently puffed.
In school, we used a magnesium fuse in a puddle of glycerin.
The drone already has electricity from a battery. Surely you could utilize it in some way. You also know with a drone that it will be flying fast and crashing into something, maybe the force of the impact could be used. This is all for a school project right?
Thermite in a bucket melts through the bucket and then dribbles out, melting/burning through just about anything it lands on. When delivered via drone, you don’t want to crash the drone since you can keep targeting that stream versus just making a puddle.
I was thinking model rocket engine igniters would do the trick.
Funny those guys seem to have returned to their hedge now that Trump is back in power.
They are to busy with their new ICE jobs to entertain such notions any longer.
Why shoot substation for free when ICE will pay them to shoot minorities and their supporters instead.
I doubt their schedule is so busy they couldn’t do both.
I imagine pouring salt in the water tanks for their cooling systems. It’ll make a giant expensive mess and potentially could shut down the datacenter for a while for repairs
Im confused, what will salt do. My brain basically autocorrected it to suger cause you can put it in concrete and it will ruin it but what does salt do?
I think the idea is to put salt in their cooling water intake and hope it corrodes something important?
Ah okay but at that point you could do something more destructive. Strange meme
During WW2, guards in the New York City subway system had a standing order to shoot on site anyone who came down a certain elevator holding a bucket of sand.
The subway is powered by DC rather than AC electricity. Today solid-state converters are used. But back then, the only option was direct mechanical conversion. Literally a giant AC motor connected to a DC generator. An AC motor was powered by the grid, and its drive shaft was joined to the shaft of a DC generator, which energized the lines of the subway.
But it represented a single point of failure. This one crucial machine was powering the whole subway system. And all it would take is one person throwing a single bucket of sand into the contraption to cause the whole NYC subway system to grind to a halt. Oh, and NYC was the primary port city for American troops and supplies going back and forth to Europe.
Neat
I don’t think it’d even work. I wouldn’t be surprised if their cooling water is distilled in the process, so the salt would just get filtered out.
On boats we literally use sea water to cool things and distill it on the ship. Data centers can surely do the same thing
I feel like boats are probably better equipped to deal with sea water than data centers but I might be wrong
I mean they could be, but there’s nothing stopping the ultra rich from spending less than one dinners’ worth of money on a salt water distillation system for the money printer
sure, but the corporations involved are hardly the most competent nor forward thinking actors :p
money can buy you expertise, ofc, but often these people have an overinflated sense of their own abilities and think their expertise with computers extends into many other fields that it does not extend to :p
I mean let’s be real, you have to use distilled water anyways if you’re using it to cool electronics. The odds that they are buying distilled water instead of distilling it themselves are incredibly fucking low given the fact that a water distillation system costs less than a server rack and buying distilled water is fucking expensive
You underestimate how much billionaires cut costs. Water distillation? That could be 1 more gpu.
There are some exploding rockets that can show you examples.
Not a bad point
Something like capsules of sodium that will only break once in the system would be much more expensive.
https://www.quora.com/Salt-Concrete-Does-adding-salt-to-concrete-make-it-1-4-x-stronger Imma leave that here.
Salt does bad things to concrete but you’d need more than that.
My views of eco terrorism are mostly from reading Zodiac : an ecothriller. The protagonist uses quick acting cement to plug polluting sewage pipes and back up the toxic waste into the polluting facilities.
This could be done in the opposite direction as well. Plug the incoming water pipe to starve the beast pulling hundreds of thousand of liters of water.
Holy shit do NOT DO THIS.
You’re assuming the failure point is going to be inside of the facility but it’s WAY more likely to be an underground pipe that will speed that that sewage directly into the earth.
This is way worse because it might not be obvious that it’s happening for a looong time.
Seriously, find some other way to ecoterrorize. This one is not worth it.
Yeah but isn’t that also an easy fix for the datacenter? Like the people running it will just shut things down, discover the cement, remove it, and start up again.
Shutting down a data center for the cost of a bag of cement is a good cost to loss ratio though. It may only be for a day but that is easily repeatable. Shut it down every few days while they are already losing money running at a loss and trying to show some sort of usage stats that will get fucked by the repeated shutdowns.
Obviously you have to find multiple ways to fuck with them like bad additives in their diesel generator fuel tanks. Drones dropping epoxy into the cooling fans on the roof.
I think the hope is that the lack of water for cooling will cause permanent damage by overheating. But the reality is there are failsafes to prevent this.
That is what I figured. Gotta do something with lasting consequences like mixing sugar into the cement.
only works if it ain’t finished yet tho
Pour a decent bit of algae into the water supply (freshwater shouldn’t have algae, but enough will get past standard biocides used in cooling)
Neal Stephenson. good stuff, before he kinda went… corpo with Termination Shock.
I wonder if he’s concluded ‘if anyone is gonna stop the cycle it’ll have to be a disruptor who just seeds atmospheric blockers’, because I wasn’t impressed with that book.
Unplugging a pipe is easy
Unknowingly having salt water corrode your cooking system over time is a disaster
I don’t think this is at all realistic.
Data centers have an entire staff of people who JUST design and operate the cooling systems. I can promise you, they monitor the condition of the water/coolant.
I spoke with an cooling engineer at great length tho worked in an AWS data center. They know when the water quality is below threshold, they cycle out the old water and replace with fresh on an ongoing basis.
If there were some type of contaminant in the water, it’d probably set off a bunch of alerts pretty fast. Even still, most of the cooling systems are made of copper or aluminum. Neither would be damaged by salt in any meaningful way.
Some acids would corrode copper and aluminum, but it’s not like it would happen fast at anything but extreme concentrations.
So you are saying, there are humans in these facilities we could target to disable those systems?
They decided to work for the clankers. They chose to be targets.
Well a data center itself does not exclusively host the computing infrastructure used for ai.
The components that run Lemmy live in a data center. The EFF hosts their content from a data center. Telecommunications that make up the internet host equipment in data centers.
I thought we were talking specifically about recently built data centers for majority use by AI companies
They don’t just blindly use whatever water comes from the lake and put it directly into the loop.
They’ll have treatment, filtration, and cossosion-resistant parts, and probably separated loops where the only liquid that directly interacts with anything important is completely isolated from the intake and outflow water.
I think OP has a $20 bucket of salt and is farming ideas for how to use it to destroy his local datacenter.
Can’t farm much else with a bucket of salt.
You don’t have permission to access “http://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/champions-choice-white-salt-block-50-lb” on this server.
That’s mean.
Who would have though one needs to VPN into the US for a site called “tractorsupply.com”…
No 50 lb salt block for you!
I’m confuse
Yeah … I’m really not sure how you’re supposed to destroy a data center with a single bucket of salt.
But I’m willing to learn.
first you have to put it in the orbit
Then propel it to near light speed and have it impact the data center?
Take it easy, bro. We’re just trying to destroy a datacenter, not wipe out the entire western hemisphere.
By the time we do that to all of the data centers, we’re gonna look like the moon.
Now we just need near infinite energy.
you know what else needs infinite energy? that’s right, datacentres
Salt bad for water cooling components? Idk
They have filtration
salt helps with rusting
That sounds like dealing with despots by waiting for them to die of old age.
$20 bucket of salt? That’s way too much for salt. Who’s your salt guy?
Sounds about right if you’re buying during a snowstorm though
The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.
The real solutions are always in the comments smh
This is just like the Romans.
Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.
Good thinking.
