Utah data center: Projected daily heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs
28 points by WarOnPrivacy 19 hours ago | 22 comments
  • phillipseamore 18 hours 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?

    • cratermoon 18 hours 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.
    • kmoser 18 hours 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 16 hours ago |
        A single datacenter having the requisite power to travel back to 1955 many times over seems pretty meaningful to me.
      • casey2 16 hours 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 11 hours 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.

        • whynotmaybe 6 hours ago |
          And in the French dubbed version, it's 2.21 gigowatt
        • kmoser 19 minutes ago |
          It could be gigawatts, if Doc Brown also pronounces "GIF" as "jif".
    • uncircle 14 hours 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 6 hours 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.

  • WarOnPrivacy 18 hours ago |

        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...

  • theamk 18 hours 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 17 hours 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.

    • anvuong 16 hours ago |
      Tbf a normal dude receiving a full force boxer's punch without the mitts can easily die or suffer serious brain trauma.
      • vrighter 13 hours ago |
        but probably his hand won't penetrate into the skull. Bigger contact patch.
        • sidewndr46 12 hours ago |
          smaller handguns don't reliably penetrate bone. it's a misunderstanding. In some cases 22LR can actually bounce off the skull
          • vrighter 9 hours ago |
            I stand corrected. I'm one of today's lucky 10000
          • Recurecur 2 hours ago |
            The round discussed was 9mm Luger, which has no problem penetrating bone.

            22 LR is no slouch either. The Alaska state record brown bear was killed by a 22 round through the skull.

    • snickerbockers 8 hours 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.
  • feverzsj 17 hours ago |
    Guess Skynet won't need all these ICBMs.
  • akomtu 16 hours 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 16 hours ago |
      Is this much different from non-AI datacenters?