alt Hacker NewsBuilding 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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They already run liquid cooling loops - compute density is way beyond what could circulate through air. Adding more pipes is probably trivial on the scale of datacenter expenses
Iron Mountain does it but they used an existing limestone mine with a large water reservoir [1][2]
Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.
[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...
[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...
So they want to build it in space. Trade one heat problem for another, but put it completely out of range (for most attackers).
Pionen in sweden is a datacenter in a bunker. The Pirate Bay used to be hosted there.
> 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.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.