Data Center Operations

Cracked water droplet - Arizona water under strain from data centers

AI Has Come for Arizona’s Water

Nearly 5 million gallons a day flows from Phoenix’s municipal supply into a gray campus at the edge of the desert. That is the standing offering that TSMC’s chip fabs take from Arizona water resources – and, for reasons that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, the semiconductor giant is the beloved customer. A […]

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zankore ai factory central java water cost a large clay water jar with a lid and a dipper

Zankore’s AI Factory: Can Central Java Afford the Water Cost?

Zankore, the 1 GW AI factory planned by Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Ooredoo, Nvidia and Nokia in Batang, Central Java, could evaporate 4.8 to 9.1 million litres of water a day in its first 200 MW phase, according to two Indonesian academics. We check that estimate against Nvidia and AWS benchmarks, explain why the undisclosed cooling choice decides the water bill, and set out the drought, subsidence, ownership and disclosure questions the project still has to answer.

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data center energy ai environmental threat a geyser erupting from a sinter mound

Using AI to Mitigate the Growing Environmental Threat of Data Centers

MIT’s Christina Delimitrou argues the fastest way to curb the environmental threat of data centers is to stop wasting the servers we already have. We explain the scale of data center energy demand, the 15 percent utilization problem, her machine learning systems from Paragon and Quasar to Seer, Sinan and Ditto, other AI levers from cooling to grid timing, where efficiency runs out, and the steps IT teams can take now.

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