3w ago

Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill controversial Data Center

https://azluminaria.org/2025/08/06/tucson-city-council-rejects-project-blue-amid-intense-community-pressure/

Uplifting News @lemmy.world

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108 comments

Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
- It's not their water, so they don't care. When it finally runs out, they'll just go somewhere else.
  
  I mean, sure, that's their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there's no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
  
  That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?
- Low humidity. Good for longevity of electronics, and makes the evaporative cooling more efficient. So it’s a matter of the benefits of that vs. the cost of the added heat.
  
  Land is also relatively cheap.
  
  Farms, now data centers? Let's add a Nestlé water or coca Cola factory.
- Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
  
  I don't understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
  If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
- Because they got fuck-you money.
- They building a new data center in the bay area California that is struggling for water all the time. But its OK they are building it upstream towards the reservoir so they can get first dibs
  
  I wonder if they could use sea water for that. I know salt is corrosive, but surely there's a reasonable solution there.
  
  What’s it called/who should I look up to learn about this?
  
  So that one's not too worried about the tectonic stability thing, then.
- Said in another comment, our deserts are tectonically stable and free of natural disasters. If you want redundant DCs, picking one on the desert is a good bet.
  
  Yeah, all we got is man made tragedy of the commons disasters where the data centers deplete not only the water for humans, but the water for the data centers. Poof, no more data.
- its also colder at night, because the desert doesnt retain heat much? in places like vegas its hot, because the asphalt and concrete absorbs heat.

Good. This whole thing was stupid when the local government and utilities keep telling us little people to conserve water because, well we're in a 113 degree desert with a complete lack of water due to climate change and they wanted to do this bullshit.
- Have you tried collecting the condensation off the glass? If you use that to wash your armpits you can go an extra day before you shower so Jeff Bezos can make numbers go up in his theoretical money.
  Edit: "Comical" thought. There is less than $2.5 trillion in cash circulating.
  That wouldn't cover 20 people net worth in a country of near 350,000,000.
- Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.
  
  heat-resistant microchips
  Wat
  
  I doubt a microchip that doesn't need cooling, while still calculating reasonably fast, is possible.
  
  Computers use electricity to do math. The more electricity you have, the more math you can do. In order to do the math, the electricity is handled in a way that outputs heat. Unfortunately, the most reliable, cost effective and plentiful materials that allow electricity to do a lot of math also get heavily impacted by heat.

Amazon have how many data centers and they wanna be building more? Greedy cunts
- We could simply stop using amazon services and they won't be build anymore.
  
  Good luck using the internet while avoiding AWS
  
  Yup, just takes a single person!
  
  I don't use AWS! Are all the data centers gone yet?
  
  Clearly I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and checks notes change how large portions of the Internet get their compute.
  I'm gonna use up all the fresh water just popping down to the data center for some AWS compute time, as a treat.
  
  I'm sure you don't actually understand how this functions but the reason that products aren't really available on storefronts anymore is because they're sold on Amazon.
  We created a monster.
  
  I mean water isn't that important
  
  Ah yes, just stop using the internet.
  
  I haven't given a god damn dime to amazon since 2020, ever since I learned about the piss bottles. I've asked (and assisted) others to do the same. What else do you expect someone to do? Speak for yourself asshole.

Why are data centers so thirsty anyway? Can't cooling systems just reuse water in a closed loop?
- Evaporative cooling needs less water mass and less surface area for the same cooling effect. They could simply use bigger heat sinks outside the building and have a bigger water cooling system to make it closed loop, but they don't want to do that.
  
  Then why the fuck do they keep wanting build them in the middle of the desert then?
- They absolutely can run closed loop. It does not cool as well as evaporative cooling (it takes MASSIVE heat to evaporate water) but it can work if designed right with large system capacity and big radiators. Trouble is it's likely more expensive than pissing away the water and we know all that matters is bottom line.
- No, usually the water doesn't cool down fast enough. Trying to reuse it just slowly heats it up, until either the water or the servers evaporate.
  
  their servers evaporating sounds like a good deal to me
  
  usually the water doesn't cool down fast enough
  ...in the time chosen. If the planet can get down to 13c overnight, I bet Skippy's relatively smaller data centre can get down sooner with a proper loop.
  I know it's hard finding a good spot of flat land now that the choicest spots have all been fracked for methane and are no longer stable - thanks, 'green' energy shysters! - but what else were ya gonna do with all that space under the solar panels?
  By-product? Free showers for the homeless with that waste heat. Yay?
- Evaporate chilling

Remember that time that Microsoft sunk a data center in the ocean, proved this was cost effective, was reliable and could scale? And now it's been five years and nothing happened? Yeah that was annoying.
Anyway their site of glowing press releases is still up for some reason
- It worked well until there was a component failure, requiring a whole farm to be taken down to replace said failed components. This is why they dropped the project.
  
  They didn't think of that when designing this?

This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.
- Also a good showcase on why you should care about your local elections. Vote for people who will protect your interests, like these folks.

So they'll just go build it in Chandler with all the others instead, I guess?

I guess that , unlike some famous people in "Phoenix Valley", the people in Tucson did not forget "the white man's greed".
Kudos to them!

Well fine, guess I'll have to make my obese fart videos the old fashioned way. Anyone seen my kimchi?

108 comments