Published: October 31, 2024
Ah yes, greenwashing. Thanks Microsoft.
This is a puff peice to distract. Microsoft has made no effort to lessen their carbon footprint.
Not supporting Microsoft, but didn’t they just lease out a nuclear power plant to reduce their carbon emissions?
Three Mile Island, and they want to do it to power their AI development. Not move their current servers and infrastructure to the nuclear power grid.
And the owner of Three Mile Island, who’s working with Microsoft, is trying to get the fed to give him the money needed to get the plant running again. Taxpayer money for Microsoft’s AI project that they’ll reap all the reward from.
Working on reactivating Three Mile Island.
Technically it just makes their carbon footprint even larger
Yeah this is like people who think they’re “saving money” when they go shopping because there’s a sale. You didn’t save money. You spent it. You just might’ve spent more (depending on the store because a lot of them mark things up just to mark them back to full price)
I recently had a tour of the Redmond campus. They have multiple geothermal wells for power as well as an air conditioning system that uses almost no energy, it was pretty neat.
Too bad all that cool stuff is negligible compared to what actually makes a difference
Like starting up a nuclear power plant to avoid burning fossil fuels?
Like making a datacenter so hungry it needs an obsolete nuclear plant, yeah. They should be building new nuclear for existing datacenters.
The nuclear plant isn’t obsolete… it’s a PWR and with modern fuel cell designs it can reach the same efficiency as modern plants
With huge campuses some business have, I wouldn’t call it negligible. Unless you yourself are running a huge business campus and have some insight on how these noobs should be doing it. 😅
Talk about putting lipstick on a pig…
No no. Those trees died of natural causes. /s
Wood is a carbon sink.
Growing trees and building things out of them is good. Trees are renewable.
We ought not be cutting down forests for it BUT farmed wood is actually a good building material.
If they really cared about carbon emissions, they would shut down all of their AI crap.
Shut down themselves even better.
Slash emissions by using the dead bodies of the source that removes carbon?
I mean, that’s the mechanism by which carbon is removed. It goes into tree, tree dies or gets cut down taking all the solidified carbon with it, new tree gets planted in its place to repeat the cycle. In fact, the fastest way to scrub carbon with the practice is to farm trees, assuming you do it sustainably.
You mean sequestered, not removed. It’s one fire away from being back in circulation.
Well, don’t set any data centers on fire.
But what if I really want to :(
Noted for the future.
So is every tree
Only the current generation of trees. The previous generations that have been broken down into soil are mostly not going back into the atmosphere as co2
Do you propose some alchemy that transforms carbon to another element? Remove carbon from the atmosphere and stop putting more up in there.
And gives some energy (and building material) in the process? Yeah, it’s just kinda hard.
So the best thing you can do with a tree, is to cut it down and use it as materials, if we want to release as little CO2 as possible?
And ofc this depends on new trees being planted in its stead.
Yes. Growing a tree from sapling to a giant trunk removes significantly more carbon from the atmosphere than an existing trunk sitting there at mass, unable to store much more carbon.
And yes, that’s why I clarified that new trees would need to be planted, right on the money.
And ofc this depends on new trees being planted in its stead.
Hence farming trees…
Trees are carbon neutral. They pull the carbon out and sequester it in themselves. When they rot or burn, the carbon is returned.
Wood? You mean Fire’s Favourite Food?
Fire suppression systems, and fire prevention mechanisms, are no joke in a data center.
Plenty of systems that displace oxygen in the room to prevent combustion.
Many places won’t let you even bring combustable materials into the data center spaces. Receiving department unboxes and puts cardboard right into the baler. Wanna store stuff in your cage? Better be in a tote.
Also, humidity is strictly controlled to prevent static buildup.
The most likely place for a fire to break out in a data center would be from battery backup systems. But at the scale that most large facilities have, there is a dedicated battery room, or they use something else for instantaneous load transfer, like flywheels.
What does a datacenter need a huge glass front for? Slashing carbon emissions? Yeah right.
Maybe it’s meant to let the sun in and save on the heating… in… a buildind that has significant excess of… nevermind.
Clients looking to rent data center space still like to see pretty spaces in their giant concrete boxes. So on a campus there is usually one of the builds that has something prettier for the front admin section.
But square footage is money, so it’s much smaller.
They actually go for LEED certification for their spaces a lot of times. So they get an energy efficiency badge for a building that uses the total power of a ~3500 homes (in the builds I have seen) 24/7/365.
I’ve also put wood panels on my car to save the environment. It’s pretty useful.
LOL they are trying to trick us. Microsoft we see you.
So lots of heat plus combustible material… That sounds like a winning idea to me.
If memory serves right, one of Germany’s datacenters went up in flames a few years ago because they had wooden flooring and no adequate fire suppression systems.
EDIT: it was in France, and Europe’s biggest datacenter.
It was OVH in France
Ah, seems to be right, my bad.
Also, to correct myself a bit more: it was Europe’s biggest datacenter.
Woot! Heavy timber construction!
