I go to a lot of data centres and often I seem to be the only person in the building. They'll require a lot of people to build them initially but largely run "lights out" with people popping in to replace a device that's failed. The monitoring software even checks out a part from storage or orders one to be delivered to site
The bigger question is does the UK have enough grid capacity for all these centres ? US comsumers are having to pay premium energy costs because centres need more and more energy and current capacity can't keep up, so they're keeping the most unproductive plants going when they should have been mothballed several years ago
If the AI bubble pops, we're going to be left with a lot of redundant centres
But one thing AIGZs need is simplified planning, cut down on the inquiries with locals holding things up because of the things like noisy data centres
My first job was at JET, as a teenage intern writing code to do basic signal-processing on some of the Machine's output. Can confirm, it's not a place that hip young coders would naturally flock to, being an old WW2 RAF base out in the middle of the countryside with essentially zero public transport links. I used to get lifts in from Didcot from one of the database admins, who would complain about how the robot that fetched the tapes from the tape cellar was always breaking down. He said he used to go to large database conferences ("big data" was not yet a thing) and laugh at the other attendees for how much smaller their datasets were. The actual amounts were pretty small by modern standards - we once calculated JET's total archive of physics data was on the order of a terabyte - though this was in the days when hard drives cost about £1 per megabyte.
The original power source for the industrial revolution was water, which is useful for data centre cooling. The associated wind and hydro may be useful for power generation. For the Lanarkshire bit, is this related to the Hunterston/Ravenscraig nuclear/steelworks cluster?
Scotland has lots of wind power and often the energy grid people pay to turn them off due to not having enough cables to send the power to England. The industry term is curtailment. Read more at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdedjnw8e85o
There are definitely some large question marks about whether the current AIGZs will ever deliver on what their brochures to Government said. It’s fair to say the process is not transparent - you can refer back to the AIGZ criteria and test for yourself whether you think they’ve met it!
I go to a lot of data centres and often I seem to be the only person in the building. They'll require a lot of people to build them initially but largely run "lights out" with people popping in to replace a device that's failed. The monitoring software even checks out a part from storage or orders one to be delivered to site
The bigger question is does the UK have enough grid capacity for all these centres ? US comsumers are having to pay premium energy costs because centres need more and more energy and current capacity can't keep up, so they're keeping the most unproductive plants going when they should have been mothballed several years ago
If the AI bubble pops, we're going to be left with a lot of redundant centres
But one thing AIGZs need is simplified planning, cut down on the inquiries with locals holding things up because of the things like noisy data centres
My first job was at JET, as a teenage intern writing code to do basic signal-processing on some of the Machine's output. Can confirm, it's not a place that hip young coders would naturally flock to, being an old WW2 RAF base out in the middle of the countryside with essentially zero public transport links. I used to get lifts in from Didcot from one of the database admins, who would complain about how the robot that fetched the tapes from the tape cellar was always breaking down. He said he used to go to large database conferences ("big data" was not yet a thing) and laugh at the other attendees for how much smaller their datasets were. The actual amounts were pretty small by modern standards - we once calculated JET's total archive of physics data was on the order of a terabyte - though this was in the days when hard drives cost about £1 per megabyte.
Very interesting - thanks for sharing - and very complementary to a piece I posted yesterday on data centres, AI businesses and AI usage in the North! https://open.substack.com/pub/futurenorth/p/ai-and-tech-is-the-north-catching
The original power source for the industrial revolution was water, which is useful for data centre cooling. The associated wind and hydro may be useful for power generation. For the Lanarkshire bit, is this related to the Hunterston/Ravenscraig nuclear/steelworks cluster?
Looks like Hunterston B was shut down in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_station But I guess they still have all the transmission lines in place?
Scotland has lots of wind power and often the energy grid people pay to turn them off due to not having enough cables to send the power to England. The industry term is curtailment. Read more at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdedjnw8e85o
This article suggests around £1 billion was spent paying providers to turn off wind turbines. https://www.businessenergydeals.co.uk/blog/wind-curtailment/
So Scotland does make sense from an excess power perspective.
There are definitely some large question marks about whether the current AIGZs will ever deliver on what their brochures to Government said. It’s fair to say the process is not transparent - you can refer back to the AIGZ criteria and test for yourself whether you think they’ve met it!