The World’s Largest Data Center Rises in Texas
Photographer Stephen Voss has been working on a project about data centers and recently travelled to Abilene, Texas to document the first data center built as part of the Stargate Project. When completed, it will be the largest data center in the world. Here’s a short drone video he took of the project:
“The place was mesmerizing and deeply unsettling,” Voss told me over email. “When finished, it’ll have the power demands of a mid-sized city and is on a piece of land that’s the size of Central Park.”
The video immediately reminded me of Edward Burtynsky’s work that documents “the impacts of human industry on the planet”.
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Robin Sloan had a post a few weeks back about this colossal data center, AI, and the ravenous demand for super-energy-intensive chips and data centers right at this moment when consumer computers have become wonderfully efficient and cool. Loved this paragraph:
They'd better be carpeting those enormous roof expanses with solar arrays...
They're building a natural gas power plant on-site and have talked about renewable energy but it wasn't super clear to me if that'll actually happen. Lots of these data centers have their cooling fans on the roof, making it harder to install solar panels, but this one uses evaporative cooling and the fans are next to the building. This should theoretically mean that they could in fact cover those roofs in solar.
There are plans for a significant amount of renewables (source: am working adjacent to those teams), but gas is going to provide most of the baseload, since they have very firm energy needs for 99.999% uptime or whatever. A lot of other data centers are taking more a renewables-first approach.
Did they plan for tornadoes? Because Abilene had seven in 2019.
This is an incorrect statement. There was 1 EF-2 tornado in Abilene in 2019. There was a second one in a nearby county.
I'm sure the future tornadoes will studiously avoid the city.
https://ktxs.com/news/local/five-year-anniversary-of-tornado-outbreak
Semi-related is that ACU in Abilene is working on new nuclear reactor technology
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