If I could give any advice to the people planning those data centers, they've got it all wrong. They assume that since they're noisy that we will plop them smack in the middle of some good farm land, surround them with corn fields and it solves the noise problem.
In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving.
So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.
The real estate is usually purchased only after the following requirements are assured, and there are many: Local and regional power grid robustness which includes: ability to service long-term capacity commitments, whether the developer will need to invest in and build substations themselves, and the legality and availability for on-site power generation (natural gas or electric). All of those requirements generally come after an assessment of local and state government appetite and willingness to cut red tape for such deals and provide favorable environmental policy.
I worked in a small DC (I think it had about 10k servers at its peak). The only time there was noise outside was if the generators were running due to an extended power outage or maintenance. We had a few trailer generators that were added on as capacity increased. Where I worked was right on the other side of the wall to one of the computer rooms and I don’t recall hearing anything. It only got loud when the door was physically opened to walk in the room, that noise was mostly from fans.
I also toured one of our larger data centers, and even inside the small cube farm area it felt like a normal office. The noise only picked up once inside the room with the servers.
Noise during construction would probably be worse than noise during operation.
Anecdata, but I was once on a tour of a colocation DC. Located in Vegas, near the old town in a basement of some office building. Completely unassuming from the outside. Inside it was a little loud, but not terribly so. Busy street level noise maybe.
It does but there is only a chance their usage will be benign depending on location and how much volume of the natural water they are going to be artificially heating. That heat has to go somewhere and more places than not could be overwhelmed because it was cheaper and more convenient to suck up 3/4 of a local stream to heat rather than pipe out deep into one of the lakes.
Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.
All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.
They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.
Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.
Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY.
700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.
500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.
We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
Data centers create some construction jobs while they are being built but not much after that. A few people to keep an eye on things, swap out failed equipment, accept deliveries.
I think the news is misleading people on the number of jobs it will create. I mentioned data centers not creating many jobs to my dad, a news junkie in Michigan, and he said he read it would create over 1k jobs. That must have been including temporary construction jobs.
Google's data center complex in Council Bluffs, IA is one of the largest in the world and it employs ... 250 people excluding temporary construction/expansion jobs.
These things don't really supply "jobs" in any sort of way that is noticeable to the surrounding community. A couple hundred people. The idea that DCs produce jobs is basically a false hope given these communities.
Well, at least a DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.
I don't know what realistic alternative the residents have in mind, but I'd say even a few jobs is better than the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
> DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.
Can we prove that the location of this DC is attracting crime? It's not a vacant lot. This protest is because DTE is expected to raise electric rates for the state's residents, so you're costing the local economy in aggregate more than the jobs that the DC is even providing. It's not guaranteed, if almost likely not, to be a net positive on the whole versus the zero-case of a "vacant lot".
> the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
I'm asking this genuinely: have you been to Michigan? The entire state is certainly not some sort of industrial wasteland and a lot of people equate the state to the Urbex porn of the shell of Detroit. This is planned in the state capital's entertainment district, not some semi-abandoned factory area.
Most of the state I've seen has been mostly nature, some sand dunes, and woods.
Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.
A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time.
They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
The noise problem is caused by fans (air cooling). Data centers cooled by water do not have noisy fans. My understand is modern data center designs use close loop water systems, eliminating noise and water table issues.
You are correct the one that I referenced in Lansing's entertainment district is water cooled. They do not point out in newspaper accounts one of the reasons for its location there is they're supplying the heated water to the towns steam district. That heated water could possibly migrate chances of a electricity rate increase.
But as several data center engineers I have spoken to agreed with me that if it was put on one of the many empty parking lots West of the Capitol it would be surrounded by mostly empty government buildings where a majority of state workers are working from home. They would still be able to access the steam district.
If it's true closed loop (i.e. no water evaporation to cool the loop) then how are they cooling the radiators without fans?
Honestly, if there is a place it would have made sense to do evaporative cooling it was probably Michigan anyways... but I hope the closed loop option ends up working out just as well.
Why would any company making data centers care about where they put them if the worst push back they get is less people than the company they employed to make sure janitors aren’t real employees of theirs, show up to protest?
They have no reason to change their behavior because no one has caused them enough pain to change their behavior.
In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving.
So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.