From Coal Plant to Data Center: Old Power Stations Are Being Repurposed
- Author: Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times
- Full Title: From Coal Plant to Data Center: Old Power Stations Are Being Repurposed
- Type: #snippet✂️
- URL: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/08/from-coal-plant-to-data-center-old-power-stations-are-being-repurposed/?utm_source=climateActionTech&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cat-newsletter-234-2024-08-25
Highlights
- Many data center markets are “heavily constrained when it comes to land availability and power,” which in turn fueled interest in smaller markets and “more complicated sites” such as old power stations (View Highlight)
- “Usually, it’s a large ‘hyperscale’ facility that would be looking at a power station,” he added, referring to the largest cloud computing providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. (View Highlight)
- Coal power stations are being decommissioned in parts of the US and Europe, but may have attributes that a data center campus would need. Industrial sites will typically have been designed for high power usage, for example, and might come with power transmission infrastructure and be located close to a water source. (View Highlight)
- The different requirements of AI workloads present an opportunity to locate data centers in less central areas, farther away from major computing hubs, because “latency,” or the time taken to send data and receive a response, is less important for training AI models. (View Highlight)