Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Big Data Center Water Problem" video.

@doodmonkey Your 1/2 correct. Yes putting in a fibre to Alaska is NOT easy, but you don't have to put a massive broad network to support a data centre or 2. You basically need a single main undersea link from Seattle to Anchorage and then go overland to Fairbanks because that's the largest most northern city of any size and you'd want to put it somewhere where it can be serviced when needed. You can back that link up via satellite and/or microwave. We have already done something similar in Australia. If you go and look at where Perth is and where the towns of Newman and Tom Price are (about 1500km North). Those 2 towns are 2 of the main centres of our iron ore industry. The mine sites themselves are operated remotely from Perth. That requires a very reliable high speed connection. The main way its done is with fibre optic backed up by satellite and microwave. I am a control systems engineer and have worked in our iron or industry which is how I know about that. And yes I do appreciate we are talking about data links with a lot more capability but the fundamental tech already exists and more importantly WORKS.
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Aerospace engineer here: Iceland has found itself to be one cheapest places on the planet for mining crypto for EXACTLY the reason you point out. Not only does Iceland have incredible natural energy resources in both hydro and geothermal (which is why they do a lot of Aluminum processing), but because of the natural environment (as in the air temperature) its also a lot cheaper to keep things like servers cool.
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@blckspice5167 I suggest you DO NOT try and tell a HVAC Engineer how to do their job ESPECIALLY when the job is climate control in a building.
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@doodmonkey Yeah I get all that. Doing anything in harsh environments is so much harder than people realise. That stretch I mentioned from Perth up to our iron ore regions is some of the harshest conditions we have. People who are NOT prepared and don't know how to be safe in that region can dies in a couple of hours. Either they dehydrate or they aren't careful and get bitten by something nobody wants to be bit by. When I first went to work there in 2005 I thought I knew what it would be like and I was WRONG (in big giant capital letters). Its not simply that its hot but its dry heat that just sucks the moisture out of your body. You don't even get that sweaty like you do at a gym because its so dry the sweat just evaporates away. So you need to be extremely careful with hydration control. Anything with caffeine or sugar is sort of out during the day. Things like Gatorade and fruit juice are lethal out there because of their sugar content. I went to college at U. Illinois and thought I knew what cold was and then in 2017/18 did a project in Saskatchewan. That was as much of an eyeopener as anything I had ever experienced. I found out what's meant by Canadian Cold and can easily get that Alaskans talk about cold in a similar way.
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