LaRocque said the decision is baffling, citing concerns over rising electricity demand, massive water consumption and air pollution linked to AI data centres.

“Vancouver is in the middle of a housing crisis and water shortage,” he said. “These centres will use more heat and water — it seems counterintuitive to me.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

With high-density computing, like the data centers that run artificial intelligence, comes immense heat that cannot be cooled with a conventional air-cooling system.

The typical cabinet loads have doubled and tripled with the deployment of AI. An air-cooling system simply cannot capture the heat generated by the high KW/cabinet loads generated by AI cabinet clusters.

Water cooling can be done in a smaller space with less power, but it requires enormous amount of water. A recent study determined that a single hyper-scaled facility would need 1.5 million liters of water per day to provide cooling and humidification.

AI is typically deployed in 20-30 cabinet clusters at or above 40 KW per cabinet. This represents a fourfold increase in KW/cabinet with the deployment of AI. The difference is staggering.

A typical Chat-GPT query uses about 10 times more energy than a Google search – and that’s just for a basic generative AI function. More advanced queries require substantially more power

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/i-sat-down-with-two-cooling-experts-to-find-out-what-ais-biggest-problem-is-in-the-data-center

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Hm, interesting -- though them requiring specific server setups to take advantage of the water-based cooling systems in the datacenter makes me pause a bit. I've seen what I imagine are those sorts of rigs at the DC I use for work, typically in segregated areas of the datacenter. Building a DC with that capability though, doesn't necessarily equate to having customers to fill the racks.