Utah data center: Projected daily heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs

Utah data center: Projected daily heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs(abc4.com)

30 points by WarOnPrivacy 12 days ago | 23 comments

    Dr. Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State
    University, prepared the analysis that estimates
    the energy footprint of the proposed data center
    is comparable to 40,000 Walmart Supercenters.

Other stats:

Size = 62mi² https://kutv.com/news/local/proposed-box-elder-data-center-r...

Energy usage = 9 Gigawats (Utah uses 4 Gigawatts total) https://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/hundreds-of-utahns-fil...

Water usage permitted = 13,000 acre-feet (26k-39k homes worth) https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/box-elder-county/mo...

phillipseamore 12 days ago |

I would have gone with "Utah datacenter power use equivalent to 16 Back to the Future DeLorean's".

What is the standard "atomic bomb" unit these days?

uncircle 12 days ago | |

Americans love their measurements in football stadium lengths or bananas, but they do not apply very well to thermal units.

Also what is a ‘standard atomic bomb’? Presumably one kept in a vault at the American National Standards Institute for reference.

WarOnPrivacy 12 days ago | | |

> Also what is a ‘standard atomic bomb’? Presumably one kept in a vault at the American National Standards Institute for reference.

I would not only adore this, I'd be a season ticket holder for the tours.

kmoser 12 days ago | |

> For a pop culture comparison, the fictional DeLorean time machine in “Back to the Future” required 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux capacitor for Marty McFly to time-travel.

This is an absolutely meaningless statistic. It's pretty hard to believe that it would be included in an otherwise informative article.

yellowapple 12 days ago | | |

A single datacenter having the requisite power to travel back to 1955 many times over seems pretty meaningful to me.

casey2 12 days ago | | |

The article is the opposite of informative, it meaningless comparing an industrial growth sector to residential. 40k residents use a million times more toilet paper a year. It uses about the same amount of energy as a similarly sized steel mill. There were multiple mills that churned out ~3GW a piece 24/7 IN UTAH! The research has been done, but the article won't inform you on that because they want to pander to brainless boomer NIMBY's that would have been gunned down 200 years ago rule over the country like tyrants far outside their worth or rights.

estimator7292 12 days ago | | |

It's also completely wrong. Doc Brown's time machine did not require 1.21 gigawatts.

Very explicitly, it's 1.21 jigawatts. Completely different unit. What's a jigawatt? It's a movie, neither jigawatts nor flux capacitors are real things.

cratermoon 12 days ago | |

Typically, a Fat Man design as tested at White Sands and used on Nagasaki, or 21 kilotons, sometimes 15 kilotons when Hiroshima is used for comparison, as in the HBO Chernobyl miniseries.

theamk 12 days ago |

The number is "approximately 16 gigawatts"

23 atomic bombs per day does not really tell me much. Both boxer's punch and a 9mm bullet have about 450 J of energy, but the effects are very different.

A better comparison would be ~550000 average US houses... or a single medium-sized aluminum smelter factory.

clipsy 12 days ago | |

> A better comparison would be ~550000 average US houses... or a single medium-sized aluminum smelter factory.

Want to provide a citation for either of these? This would have the average US household dissipating the equivalent of ~30kW, which does not pass the smell test for me.

snickerbockers 12 days ago | |

Thats why they gave the measurement in watts (which is power) and not joules (which is energy). The answer is that even if the fist and the bullet transfer equivalent amounts of energy the bullet has significantly higher instantaneous power because the energy is transferred over a shorter period of time.

anvuong 12 days ago | |

Tbf a normal dude receiving a full force boxer's punch without the mitts can easily die or suffer serious brain trauma.

vrighter 12 days ago | | |

but probably his hand won't penetrate into the skull. Bigger contact patch.

feverzsj 12 days ago |

Guess Skynet won't need all these ICBMs.

akomtu 12 days ago |

AI datacenters are effectively boilers that burn gas, heat the atmosphere and boil rivers. Remember that GPUs turn all electricity into heat. As a side effect, they also produce slop.

dr_ick 12 days ago | |

Is this much different from non-AI datacenters?

Dr. Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, prepared the analysis that estimates the energy footprint of the proposed data center is comparable to 40,000 Walmart Supercenters.