r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 5d ago

Society One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center

https://www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-americas-last-chestnut-groves-is-about-to-be-destroyed-for-a-data-center
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u/mismocanibalismo 5d ago

Why are they not just building these things in Wyoming where there’s space to spare?

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u/Chiiro 5d ago

Probably cuz it's too far from infrastructure and those winters can get brutal.

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u/spencertron 5d ago

Can we use the brutal winters for cooling 😅

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u/scienceisaserfdom 5d ago edited 5d ago

Absolutely! See the NCAR Wyoming Supercomputer Center for an example of that and WY has a ton of wind power as well. Unfortunately, these AI Data Centers aren't built for sustainability whatsoever....because that would be pretty expensive. Rather these are built explicitly for the speed they can be rapidly constructed (before the public can organize), in the most bribe-able/corrupt/ungoverned places in the US, and most importantly in total disregard of environmental impact that would otherwise drive up construction costs or force them to actually pay for the resources that are sucking up. That last part is important, because there are also often giant large tax incentives/bribes secretly negotated between these companies and a state or local polticial establishement (almost always Repugs) to give away huge rate discounts on water and electricity that taxpayers are actually subsidizing. Beyond all that, its catagorically insane and cartoonishly evil to erase this genentically-critical grove of trees; as there is absolutely no reason why this project cant just be re-sited beyond the staggering greed and political graft driving it.

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u/kinglouie493 5d ago

But the cooling costs could be offset in those months, no?

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u/Chiiro 5d ago

I think the bigger issue would be the building itself withstanding all the wind and snow buildup.

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u/S14Ryan 5d ago

Wyoming, famously impossible to build in 

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u/Slumunistmanifisto 5d ago

Not a structure out there, just folks living down the holes they make in the hills.

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u/S14Ryan 5d ago

That’s what I’ve been hearing 

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u/Chiiro 5d ago

I mean the construction of the data center cutting corners and it not being able to hold up against the winter weathers.

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u/gunglejim 5d ago

You have no idea how building codes and inspections work. This literally can’t happen. Especially data centers. They’re under even more scrutiny because of how unpopular they are. Source? I’m an inspector and have been in construction for 25 years

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u/Significant_Mine9465 5d ago

make the corners round.so there is no cutting corners

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 5d ago

What snow buildup, that thing would be generating so much heat everything around it would be melted for like a 100 yards lol

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 5d ago

Latency, I imagine.  It takes about 70ms to send a round trip signal across the US. So in general you want your datacenter as close as possible to where it's used, so it can be single digit milliseconds.

That plus some asshole in government will agree to give you a bunch of free shit and make sure residents pay your tax burden for the next 100 years because you're going to bring 6 full time jobs to the area.  That doesn't work if Wyoming gets all 500 permanent jobs from all of the datacenters we're building.

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u/Sibs 5d ago

I would think the biggest factor would be how easily they can buy electricity below market value.

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u/Fair-Stop9968 5d ago

Unless citadel is paying for it 70ms is nothing no?

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 5d ago edited 5d ago

70ms is ages in computing.  3 round trips and you're looking at a fifth of a second burned on nothing.  Latency can mean the difference between doing an operation 500 times per second or 15.

I worked for a company with a 15ms round trip between some of its locations, and the amount of extra work to have that not be crippling for certain things was extraordinary.

There are many things it makes no difference for, but people do choose datacenter locations based on latency. 

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u/Surous 5d ago

This is said by someone who hasn’t actually worked near one

They are massive operations, Logistics alone takes a few dozen people

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u/lordnacho666 4d ago

Latency is irrelevant for 99% of use cases.

You'd only need a few dozen DCs anyway to cover the planet in sub 100 ms latency.

Cheap power is what matters.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 4d ago

100ms is ludicrously high latency.  Though yes, cheap power is probably a larger consideration. 

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u/lordnacho666 4d ago

Nah, you won't feel 100ms for your average SaaS or similar website. Anything with adverts would be much slower.

Someone put up a post of Google datacentres the other day. There's some pretty big countries without one.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 4d ago

While there are plenty of consumer products that would struggle at 100ms (video games spring to mind), datacenters like this don't just run consumer loads.

But these are AI-focused datacenters. They're going to be in the loop for all sorts of real-time processes where the difference between 5 and 10 ms will be gigantic. 

Even conventional things like guaranteeing that data is persisted remotely before continuing and preventing split-brain scenarios by ensuring a quorum are very common operations that get dramatically more difficult with higher latency.

But even for website loads, a datacenter customer is going to always choose a datacenter closer to its customers. Websites are often hosted in DCs on both the East and West coasts for this reason.  Which is how I know what a pain it is synchronizing at high volume between distant datacenters with high latency.

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 5d ago

What does single digit latency have to do with a datacenter?

All the wait and processing time is done locally at the center, then the output is sent.

It's not like they're trying to make some real time, fast paced, reactive, and interactive thing for customers to use.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 5d ago

They are, in fact, trying to make several real time, fast paced, reactive, and interactive things for customers to use. These are not limited to LLMs.

Off the top of my head, controlling equipment at customer sites and audio communication, but also a hundred things we haven't thought of yet, because when you're spending trillions on datacenters, you want a little future proofing.

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u/vagabond_nerd 5d ago

That is billionaire bunker territory

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u/AGushingHeadWound 5d ago

Wyoming told them to fuck off.

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u/Beneficial_Map6129 4d ago

Because rich people own land in Wyoming

Literally the most pristine land

And the state is very supportive of low taxes

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u/tadsagtasgde 5d ago

These data centers won’t be used for ai and cloud stuff. They are preparing for crypto and stock exchange traffic. And in those instances being closer matters.

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u/lordnacho666 4d ago

No, that's wrong. People who need to be close to the exchange simply rent a space inside the exchanges DC.

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u/tadsagtasgde 4d ago

Yes. That is the principle in talking about. Now apply it to crypto.

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u/NewtsinBoots 5d ago

Dessert and prairie ecosystems are still valuable and beautiful!! Why don't they just not build them at all?