Rally comes as city prepares for a major expansion of AI infrastructure, with data centre projects planned for Mount Pleasant and downtown.

Excerpt:

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.”

  • brianpeiris@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    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.caEnglish
      1·
      5 months 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.