Why don’t AI and other big online companies place their servers on cold locations instead of using absurd amounts of water as part of their refrigeration system?
Why don’t AI and other big online companies place their servers on cold locations instead of using absurd amounts of water as part of their refrigeration system?
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They are a bit cheaper and less resource intensive in places where the weather is colder, so this is already happening to some degree. But the costs of building a big thing in a remote place in the arctic are gonna be too high so there’s a limit to how much anyone will do that
Space is going to be the real game changer. The heat dissipation required for humanities next leap forward will hopefully be done on the moon.
Consider the coldest place you know on earth, is there really any significant development? Ie: roads, markets, homes for employees to live, airports, etc.
And on top of that, you’d need to find a way to capture that cold air and use it to cool the systems in a way that produces minimal moisture that could damage components or cause degradation. You can’t just throw the motherboards on the snow and expect it to cool 5+gpu’s efficiently.
Btw: the water doesn’t go anywhere. It is looped through the system. We have plenty of water on earth, and the “Ai is wasting our water” is one of the more silly anti Ai arguments.
To add to what others said, for most data centers it matters how close the servers are to the end clients, the more wires and nodes in the way the longer it will take for you to get those bytes.
The water cooling is to directly cool the components, not the room they’re in. A good comparison would be trying to drive a car with no radiator just because it’s cold outside.
Microsoft carried out an experiment in which they submerged some data centers in the ocean which saw some success, but after the experiment ended the program was discontinued (for now at least.)
China on the other hand just recently started their own underwater datacenter program.
As other people have mentioned, a major challenge is obviously accessibility. You need to both be able to access these data centers to carry out repairs and upgrades, as well as be able to deliver all the requisit power and equipment.
Facebook (Meta) has done exactly that with their Lulea data center in Sweden:
https://datacenters.atmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Meta_s-Lulea-Data-Center.pdf
Generally, you want your data center close to cheap power, cheap labor resources, and a water source for cooling. If it’s cold year-round, you likely are short the other two key factors.
They do.
But there is more to a data center then just cooling.
Electricity pricing is so important Microsoft purchased Three Mile Island to bring its nuclear power plant online to power its AI work.
There are also the engineers who you need to staff the centers
As well as cost of construction and how much the local governments will give the company in kickbacks for building in their area.