Microsoft builds first datacenters with wood to slash carbon emissions
Microsoft builds first datacenters with wood to slash carbon emissions
Microsoft is building datacenters made with CLT to slash the use of steel and concrete and significantly reduce the embodied carbon footprint.
Published: October 31, 2024
This is a puff peice to distract. Microsoft has made no effort to lessen their carbon footprint.
103Technically it just makes their carbon footprint even larger
22Yeah this is like people who think they’re “saving money” when they go shopping because there’s a sale. You didn’t save money. You spent it. You just might’ve spent more (depending on the store because a lot of them mark things up just to mark them back to full price)
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Not supporting Microsoft, but didn't they just lease out a nuclear power plant to reduce their carbon emissions?
3Three Mile Island, and they want to do it to power their AI development. Not move their current servers and infrastructure to the nuclear power grid.
And the owner of Three Mile Island, who's working with Microsoft, is trying to get the fed to give him the money needed to get the plant running again. Taxpayer money for Microsoft's AI project that they'll reap all the reward from.
5Working on reactivating Three Mile Island.
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Ah yes, greenwashing. Thanks Microsoft.
65Wood on concrete 🥳!
12Wood colored concrete 🤔!
5Should have been wood on used tires!
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Slash emissions by using the dead bodies of the source that removes carbon?
43I mean, that's the mechanism by which carbon is removed. It goes into tree, tree dies or gets cut down taking all the solidified carbon with it, new tree gets planted in its place to repeat the cycle. In fact, the fastest way to scrub carbon with the practice is to farm trees, assuming you do it sustainably.
36Trees are carbon neutral. They pull the carbon out and sequester it in themselves. When they rot or burn, the carbon is returned.
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Talk about putting lipstick on a pig…
41No no. Those trees died of natural causes. /s
9Wood is a carbon sink.
Growing trees and building things out of them is good. Trees are renewable.
We ought not be cutting down forests for it BUT farmed wood is actually a good building material.
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If they really cared about carbon emissions, they would shut down all of their AI crap.
34Shut down themselves even better.
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What does a datacenter need a huge glass front for? Slashing carbon emissions? Yeah right.
22Maybe it's meant to let the sun in and save on the heating... in... a buildind that has significant excess of... nevermind.
18Clients looking to rent data center space still like to see pretty spaces in their giant concrete boxes. So on a campus there is usually one of the builds that has something prettier for the front admin section.
But square footage is money, so it's much smaller.
They actually go for LEED certification for their spaces a lot of times. So they get an energy efficiency badge for a building that uses the total power of a ~3500 homes (in the builds I have seen) 24/7/365.
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Wood? You mean Fire's Favourite Food?
17Fire suppression systems, and fire prevention mechanisms, are no joke in a data center.
Plenty of systems that displace oxygen in the room to prevent combustion.
Many places won't let you even bring combustable materials into the data center spaces. Receiving department unboxes and puts cardboard right into the baler. Wanna store stuff in your cage? Better be in a tote.
Also, humidity is strictly controlled to prevent static buildup.
The most likely place for a fire to break out in a data center would be from battery backup systems. But at the scale that most large facilities have, there is a dedicated battery room, or they use something else for instantaneous load transfer, like flywheels.
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I've also put wood panels on my car to save the environment. It's pretty useful.
17LOL they are trying to trick us. Microsoft we see you.
15So lots of heat plus combustible material.. That sounds like a winning idea to me.
13Woot! Heavy timber construction!
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