this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Because salt is corrosive, and the real estate is expensive.
Why not build in the cold north? Snow, ice breaking stuff, more expensive construction and work.
There’s a common misconception that these data centers are so big to literally suck up all resources… that’s not it.
It’s just corpos cheaping out.
Why the desert? Because evaporative cooling is cheap as heck, and low power, and works best in dry air. And the land is cheap. And grid energy is cheap.
Why local power plants and generators? Because it’s cheaper than grid energy; it cuts out the middle man. And it increases reliability. Not because there’s literally not grid capacity.
Hence, you are onto a thermodynamically interesting idea. The waste heat could be a “preheater” for desalination.
But of course they are not going to do that: it would cost more money.
Nor would they hook up the waste heat to local communities. Why would they pay to do that and extend construction time?
Also, as a counterpoint, osmotic desalination (which requires no heat) tends to be cheaper anyway, but is still a very, very expensive water source.
Speaking of the north, the answer is yes. You totally can, and should, use the heat for something like district heating.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews%2Ffeatures%2F2025-05-14%2Ffinland-s-data-centers-are-heating-cities-too
One thing I will say is here in the desert, we don't actually want them either. Water is already an issue. Power costs are already an issue when you're cooling your house all summer/heating it all winter. Data centers provide minimal jobs for the amount of resources they use in a community and the downsides have been discovered in a number of places around the country too (ranging from noise to increased costs to resource shortages). Keep your data centers off our cactii!
It would be fine if they developed solar, used closed loop or geothermal systems, distributed waste heat and such as compensation. It honestly wouldn't be a bad plan compared to other places, seeing how the copious sun, dry winters, and still relatively cheap land would be great for operations.
But no, they only want the absolute cheapest route out there.
They dont even need to hook up and construct a geothermal heat system for a community, either. There are giant sand heat batteries in norway to store excess heat that they then tap into their community heat systems.
These data centers could be responsible to build the giant sand battery and then be done with it, leaving the distribution to the municipality or state, but they aren't even inclined to do that.
It sounds a little complex in a desert because (AFAIK) data centers produce relatively low-level heat, and in the summer the inlet side would need to be cooled significantly. This sounds like less of an issue in Norway with relatively low average temperatures.
The medium would be cheap as heck though.
Another confounding factor is the necessity of water cooling. I think data centers like evaporators because they can use dirt cheap and standard air cooled servers, and simply A/C the room with the evaporators, where more complex systems would need larger air heat exchangers and a well below ambient return.
The answer, as always, is profit.
Short term gain, specifically.
They want the data center up and cheaply built to make next quarter look good, not lower their costs long term.
Fuck man... I'm so over capitalism. Shits just exhausting...
The boiling method is used when there are industrial processes that generate a lot of waste heat. You can make it reasonably efficient by taking the heat away on the cooling side and recirculating it back to the hot end.
But yes, datacenters don't really generate enough heat for that to work without heat pumps concentrating it. All your other points stand.