Bahnd Rollard

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 26th, 2023
  • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•xAI Data Center Emits Plumes of Pollution, New Video ShowsEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    We have similar products where I work as well, they are just expensive thermal imaging cameras. They would not be able to identify the chemical contents of a gas cloud at a distance, just that there was a cloud. The point is that in the age of digital media, its very hard to prove anything is what you say it is. Between photoshop and AI making a mess of the digital media landscape, it makes things increasingly difficult to validate, and shouting “do your own reaserch” will only add to the ambiguity as the internet is not static and can be changed by anyone at any time.

  • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•xAI Data Center Emits Plumes of Pollution, New Video ShowsEnglish
    3313·
    5 days ago

    This article and what they are doing feels fishy, for a few reasons.

    • Data centers usually have steam plumes, but only with older cooling systems, newer designs dont vent off nearly as much water vapor and even newer designs have liquid-to-chip, and im not sure how those vent the heat, but its definitly not venting their treated coolant+water. (Because that would be dumb and expensive, but that seems to be the flavor of the day, so lets roll with that)

    • If the building was not designed by a monkey, then this is likely just a generator test. I want to put the emphasis on “TEST” because a data center only runs its very inefficent generators when utility power fails. (They will generate exaust, but usually its diesle generators or something with cheap fuel). Fancy gas turbines sounds very “extra” because the reason that deisle generators are used is that they can turn on and hold the load of the building quickly (and the building should have a battery bank to hold that for exactly what ever that time is)

    To me, one of two things is wrong, either the camera is just imaging thermals and thats a normal steam plume and they are being sensationalist. OR (and more likely answer). Musk is building some bespoke data center in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere without the local infrastructure to support it and is doing all sorts of expensive additions to make it do what it would be able to if it was clustered with other data centers that share utilitites.