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MiroslavPokorny • today at 8:23 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Datacenters are full of valuable computers and related equipment, but building the equivalent space under a mountain will cost a crazy amount.

Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.


Replies

walrus01 • today at 8:26 AM

Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.

So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.

You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.

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jazzyjackson • today at 8:28 AM

The bunkers are already out there e.g. limestone mines in US, Italy,

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...

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roenxi • today at 8:32 AM

It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.

Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.

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