[laughs]

Uh, I focus, uh, as one of my main research areas on trends in computing devices and systems.

And back in the late nineties, there were a couple of guys running around talking about how the internet was gonna use half of all of our electricity.

And as part of, uh, analyzing those kinds of claims, I decided to spend a lot more time measuring and understanding the energy use of different computing devices.

And as part of that work, uh, I started to look into the historical energy efficiency of computing.

And also, by the way, it's not ripping away national parks and forests and stuff.

Right, exactly.

There's no reason to be doing that.

And Jonathan, my understanding is that there's a bunch of different designs, but that most of them do do this.

Well, first let's, uh, it is true there are a lot of different designs.

Let's talk about the two phases of data center cooling.

So one part of it is taking the heat out of the computers.

And for the new AI data centers, these racks of computers are so dense that they need to use some kind of a closed loop liquid system.

It might be water, it might be some other fluid that is even better than water for this kind of thing.

And then there's the question of how you get the heat out of the data center.

Um, Jonathan, in this case, like, w- what I really heard in Jesse's, uh, question, and there's another listener who has a similar, um, situation here, is, is this actually worse than, you know, other uses in these areas? This, uh, listener had a question about the Gilroy data center, and they said, "Wouldn't a data center have a much smaller impact on a community like Gilroy compared to how much impact legions of trucks from a distribution center would have? Why are private citizens the right people to decide if there's enough energy for a data center? Why don't we just charge Amazon a lot for power and have them subsidize everyone else's power?" So I, I think the way to take this is, uh, to give us a sense of how does a data center compare pluses and minuses versus, you know, some other kind of big industrial facility?