• blargh513@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    I don’t think this is at all realistic.

    Data centers have an entire staff of people who JUST design and operate the cooling systems. I can promise you, they monitor the condition of the water/coolant.

    I spoke with an cooling engineer at great length tho worked in an AWS data center. They know when the water quality is below threshold, they cycle out the old water and replace with fresh on an ongoing basis.

    If there were some type of contaminant in the water, it’d probably set off a bunch of alerts pretty fast. Even still, most of the cooling systems are made of copper or aluminum. Neither would be damaged by salt in any meaningful way.

    Some acids would corrode copper and aluminum, but it’s not like it would happen fast at anything but extreme concentrations.

    • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      So you are saying, there are humans in these facilities we could target to disable those systems?

      They decided to work for the clankers. They chose to be targets.

      • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        Well a data center itself does not exclusively host the computing infrastructure used for ai.

        The components that run Lemmy live in a data center. The EFF hosts their content from a data center. Telecommunications that make up the internet host equipment in data centers.

          • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
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            3 days ago

            They typically don’t just build 'em for AI. Data centers are general purpose buildings. They provide power, cooling, security, floorspace. What goes into 'em doesn’t change anything. You can stuff computers in there that are used for cancer research, cryptomining, AI, ecommerce, it doesn’t matter.