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Far north cool places seem logical for data centers. Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
by api 6d ago
Far north cool places seem logical for data centers.
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
- seany 6d ago* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it. * easy permitting * lots of space
- topato 6d agoWhich makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
- whall6 6d agoNew Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
- hn993302 6d agoGot an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
- SteveNuts 6d agoQTS is building a second campus in Chicago with closed loop https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop-cooling-to-eliminate-ongoing-water-use/ https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop...
- hn993302 6d agoOk, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
- nomel 6d agoThere's also a power generation water cost though! Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year. I don't know if that's significant.
- derektank 6d agoPulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
- nomel 6d agoDoes that change the math above if they're tied into the grid? If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
- derektank 6d agoIf it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
- AnthonyMouse 6d agoIt's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
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- fred_is_fred 6d agoNorth Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
- whall6 6d agoAgree with this. Natural gas is effectively free there. Maybe it’s the fiber connectivity that prevents them from being built? I genuinely don’t know.
- nomel 6d agoAlaska has a speed of light problem.
- fwip 6d agoDoesn't seem especially relevant for LLMs. Especially not for training, but even for inference.
- nomel 6d agoSure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
- derektank 6d agoAlaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
- faitswulff 6d agoPolitics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
- mcmcmc 6d agoCalling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron tbh
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- zdragnar 6d agoThe company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that. Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
- mcmcmc 6d ago> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing. I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
- Lerc 6d agoIf everything the AI companies are saying is true, we'll all be living in a utopia while simultaneously annihilated by a rogue AI. It will be pretty, but rather quiet.
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- whall6 6d ago1. Cheap natural resource 2. Fiber connectivity 3. Low population density 4. Favorable regulatory environment Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
- augment_me 6d agoSouthern states have more republicans so it's easier to sell public land or draw this kind of contracts without a massive community backlash
- gpt5 6d agoNot everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states. The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
- bsder 6d agoUnions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down. Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor. Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
- yellowapple 6d agoThe requirement to use union labor for construction hasn't stopped datacenter buildouts here in Nevada.
- andsoitis 5d ago> Texas … notoriously … anti-resident What do you mean Texas is anti-resident?
- hn993302 6d agoGoogle claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
- AngryData 6d agoPerhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
- yellowapple 6d agoArizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
- epistasis 6d agoNuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company. When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023: https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/25890-hs-olkiluoto-3-has-been-a-financial-catastrophe-for-areva-siemens.html https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk: https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-its-implications https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i... The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today. Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them. If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
- SoftTalker 6d agoThis is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
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- epistasis 5d ago
- bawolff 6d agoTraditionally you cared alot about internet connectivity and latency to your customer base. I imagine Texas comes out a lot better on that front. That probably matters a lot less for AI.
- dyauspitr 6d agoIf done correctly there’s a lot of free solar energy in sunny states.