Electricity is a must have and it’s one that everybody and every organisation must have. How it’s made is the thing and, because it’s an associated component in my background, I’ve been thinking a lot about one particular aspect of how it’s manufactured and used.
As part of my contract for a large organisation I project managed the build, implementation, and go-live of a significant underground datacentre. I like underground datacentres, they come with big bags of challenges that aboveground datacentres don’t (and I’ve built, implemented, and gone-live with a bunch of them too). This particular datacentre is air-gapped, meaning it has no external connectivity to any system. Fantastic! Everything is hands-on, no remote hands, no iLO2, even KMM trollies were plug-in. The ops team worked on the level above and they too were air-gapped. No external connectivity to any portion of the underground site at all.
So, obviously, the datacentre had its own power generation, its own water supply, its own air supply, its own fire-fighting equipment, its own drainage (and that was a significant design restriction to overcome!) and, in case of power outages, its own 3-level failovers. I know, to the nearest decimal place, how much power that datacentre demanded for every minute of its 24/7 operation. But the thing is, that datacentre isn’t a significantly hungry facility to feed. The function of the racks of servers is a lot of compute and a moderate amount of storage, but that type of compute is relatively low demand. The heat, such as it was, was pumped and re-used in clever ways. The near Arctic-level air conditioning has a low overhead and, again, the heat-cost of cooling (sounds bizarre, I know, but there is a significant heat-cost in manufacturing cooling) was absorbed by clever design features within the structure and nothing went to the surface – no heat signatures, no power outputs, no power inputs, no mains services, nothing. You could stand on the surface and not know there was something interesting a long way beneath your feet.
However generation becomes a really big issue when datacentres tack on to their normal compute and storage requirements, AI. Yes, artificial intelligence really is a power-hungry beast. The energy requirements for AI are now so challenging that large portions of the US power grid are no longer able to cope with the electrical demand from datacentres which are AI-specific (and that’s the new trend – parcel off your AI compute requirements to an AI-specific datacentre). So, to get around this significant challenge, AI-specific datacentres are now being designed and built with their own Small Modular Reactors (SMRs, also known as “microreactors”) to feed the energy-hungry beasts within. The trouble is, these SMRs (and this is missing from the names and the TLAs) are actually nuclear reactors. Yep. AI-specific datacentres are being built with their own neat little nuclear reactors bolted onto the side. How fantastic is that? Well, yes. It isn’t fantastic at all.
The world is a perilous place. Just as it takes only one deranged ballroom-obsessed individual to destabilise his own country (and a bunch of others closely associated with it), it only takes one equally deranged individual, armed with determination and a small amount of C4 explosives, to make an SMR into a nuclear explosion. The supporters of SMRs say this will never happen but anyone who uses the word “never” has clearly not learned from historical events where other people have used the same word, only to be proved wrong. I’m not jumping on the old “Nuclear power? No thanks” bandwagon from decades ago. I’m simply saying the idea of having 8 or 9 SMR-powered datacentres within, let’s say, the UKs M25 motorway, is not only a geopolitical risk, it’s a national security/military risk. And it seems to be a bunch of risks which the people in charge have yet to consider as risks.
Let’s say, for a moment, that if those SMRs in the south of England were to be hit by speeding trucks loaded with a quantity of high explosive, in a coordinated attack… that datacentre I project-managed, implemented, and went live with is likely to be one of the safest places in the southern half of the UK. Now that’s what you call ironic, Alanis.