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(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Australia isn't the greatest spot to run a data centre in general in terms of heat, but I do understand the need for sovereign data centres, so this obviously can't work everywhere.
What makes you think $3.5 million can't be profitable? A mid sized hospitals heating bill can get into the many hundreds of thousands or into the millions even. Especially if it's in a colder environment. A 5-6 year payback on that wouldn't be terrible and would be worth an upfront investment. Even a 10 year payback isn't terrible.
These colder locations are the ideal locations for the data centres in the first place because they generally want a cooler climate to begin with, so they will gravitate to them when possible.
Edit: And if you build a data centre with this ability to recoup heat, you could start building further commercial things in the area and keep the heat redistribution very close. You don't need to travel very long distances. You do need to put some thought into where they go through and whats around or will be built around.
Ok. We're deviating off the point of LLM profitability here and have driven this conversation off into the weeds. So I'll make this one last comment, and then I'm done. This debate has been interesting but exhausting.
Final counterpoints:
LLMs have long since gone beyond the scope of interesting science project to something driven by pure parasitic greed.