Like, would a skyscraper-style datacenter be practical? Or is just a matter of big, flat buildings being cheaper?

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[–] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Well, data centers require a lot of water for cooling. It's harder to pump water up high.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    It's harder to do anything up high. Construction, climate control, transportation (moving something from one end to another), managing fires, additions, evacuation of personnel in an emergency, etc. etc., all get much harder when you build up up versus across.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)

    Guess it depends on the height, but yeah. Otherwise, we manage to pump a town's worth of water to the top of a tower well enough. From there, gravity can do the rest.

    But there's probably a point where cost for that vs height becomes prohibitive.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    There's a slow, steady source of water being pumped into those towers, so the water level fluctuates through the day. They use gravity to get high pressure from your tap, but I'm the world of liquid cooling, you gotta go fast!

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