Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions Microsoft is experimenting with datacenters made out of wood in a bid to cut the growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that result from constructing its expanding network of bit barns. In Northern Virginia, Microsoft is erecting its first datacenters using cross-laminated timber (CLT), an engineered product made from layers …
OK, I'll bite: what OS should the great unwashed run on their computers?
I am planning to sit out Win 11 myself, but asking for a friend.
Back on the subject of the article: anyone else think 60-70 years as a lifetime for a building isn't exactly ambitious? I know that's par for the course here in North America, but I owned a wooden house built pre-1911 (that's when it is recorded as hooked up to the water mains) that was fine, once it was retrofitted with insulation. Doubling the expected lifetime is essentially the same as halving the carbon intensity.
>I owned a wooden house built pre-1911
How much have the functional requirements for 'single family home' changed since 1911?
Probably less than the requirements for hyperscale data center. Which in 1911 was a room full of women with slates
I was more referring to general construction practices. 70 years is very unambitious for a projected lifetime for most buildings, IMHO, outside of seismically active areas where construction standards evolve quickly. Plenty of places in Europe, or on the East Coast, have really old buildings, yet plenty of new places in North America seem to be designed with a cheap-n-cheerful, it-doesn't-have-to-last PoV.
Yeah. I have just had the tiles on my roof replaced after 94 years. That is 20+ years beyond the expected life of those tiles. That is down to the type of clay used. It was very soft after firing so every time an access on the roof was made, I was left with broken tiles.
Canada does a lot of asphalt roof shingles. Well-installed, they have 25 year warranties. Less well installed, they don't last. They are very cheap to apply, but they don't last nearly as well if the older layer(s) haven't been taken out first - which is more labor-intensive. Past the first old underlayer - most warranties are void, but people often slap them on anyway.
My house had 7 layers, with the newest one having been put in months before to spruce it up for the sale. We paid for an inspector who said it had to be redone - not least due to excess structural load - and we negotiated $4k off from the sales price (25 yrs ago). The actual cost was $17k, and only because the people who took on the job thought we only had 5 underlayers going (we didn't really know the exact number ourselves until they started ripping them out).
Nowadays, in wildfire areas, the wisdom of using them is being revisited as they are basically solidified petroleum. This is also somewhat true of vinyl sidings, also popular. Tiles and the like are not used because it's more expensive to put them in the first time (and, well, seismic zones can be problematic as well).
"70 years is very unambitious for a projected lifetime for most buildings"
My home has had all manner of tweaks and bits added, shifted, moved... but the core predates the US by... quite a long time. It's so old that the main room doesn't have right angles as they hadn't quite sussed that. Oh, and the stone walls are so bloody thick that when I'm in bed I'm literally three or four metres from the AP but my WiFi signal strength is around 15% on a good day. It's survived wars, plagues, dragons, and god knows what else.
>anyone else think 60-70 years as a lifetime for a building isn't exactly ambitious?
"Not exactly ambitious" is pretty much how the whole world is currently operating. "Long term" is, what, five years? It's like everyone believes to be on the initial incline towards the singularity or the apocalypse or both, and there's no point planning. I don't think this zeitgeist is sustainable in the (real) long term.
All that would happen is that some other mega corporation would fill the space with no change in CO2 emissions.
Who runs the datacentres is largely irrelevant, the output is the same.
Given the CO2 that is produced is mostly in the IT kit and actually running it, the reduction in construction is lost in the noise.
The other important point is that just using wood does not necessarily mean it is green, renewable or sustainable.
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I can only imagine that this is nothing more than a pot mediatic green washing episode.
When you consider that bit barn run 24/24, 365 days a year the energy consumption/carbon footprint must be exponentially larger on the inside than it is from the shell.
We don't need eternal computing power if all it is being used for is pretend intelligence and meaningless data storage.
Why not spend all the money on researching a means to reducing the quantity of computers and their associated power consumption..
It won't be long before entire nuclear plants are built just to satisfy the egos of the GAFAs and their non essential projects.
It's truly sad that they they appear to be untouchable in their endless research for benefit.
> To ensure durability and waterproofing, a thin layer of concrete will be applied
Thin concrete is NOT durable or waterproof. This is brazen greenwashing. Thin concrete "fireproofing" part of the World Trade Center fire (the other part was far more fuel than anybody had contemplated).
Maine is trying to grow a heavy laminated wood industry. The local college has build a couple nice and practical buildings of the stuff. The laminated wood is not "construction plywood", it is quite special and typically specified VERY THICK. Heavy timber can be VERY fire-resisting, as seen in mill-buildings in New England. Starts to char and the char insulates the heart of the timber. Thick laminated wood with the usual glues doesn't need a lot of waterproofing. (Yes, thin plywood with cheap glue just curls up.)
The need for Carbon in concrete making is very real. A nearby (and Native American owned) concrete plant just shut down because of the economics of cooking limestone. (Whatever you call it, the #1 heating fuel is Carbon (coal), slightly cut with Hydrogen for ease of use (oil and gas).
I have real doubts about the Carbon balance of wood products. I have no doubt that AI is at best bogus and perhaps dangerous. But this type building is as good as any other and better than some.
> I have real doubts about the Carbon balance of wood products.
Well there is perhaps the more pressing problem: increasingly limited supply due to rapidly dwindling supply of mature timber. Although we could put the AI boom on hold for 30~40 years, whilst landowners cash in and plant woods instead of solar panels.
Mind you if the technique uses the fast growing wood, favoured by Drax et al, it could kill off Drax et al due to “not insignificant” price increases.
>"rapidly dwindling..."<
BRAVO SIERRA!
Pacific NW timber country here. We have TOO MUCH mature timber, and it NEEDS to be harvested. The 1980's ban on logging federal lands has resulted in the accumulation of excess standing timber. This is a SEVERE fire hazard that gets worse every year. The logging you do see is on land owned by timber companies and is used for that purpose. It is the interspersed BLM land which is not being touched and keeps adding more fuel every year (the old BLM acronym, not the new one).
Timber is a crop. Modern hybrid trees produce fresh harvestable timber once a generation, around every 40 years. Don't prattle on about 'old growth' forests either - the only reason they were NOT harvested 100 years ago is because the timber is in a location which is a PITA to access.
Thin concrete is NOT durable or waterproof. This is brazen greenwashing. Thin concrete "fireproofing" part of the World Trade Center fire
Some kind of typo there, but yes, concrete is used to make steel more fireproof. And the fireproofing was inadequately applied to the top half of the WTC, after the builder went bust and was replaced by somebody who cut costs.
Structural wood is already more fireproof than structural steel, so it's not clear if this thin concrete is fireproofing or not. And concrete is not known for being waterproof -- although it is sometimes used to make waterproof membranes more durable. And "thin" in this context just means "thin" like a driveway -- thick enough to drive over, not thick enough to support a roof when stood on end.
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I agree it is a massive mess (look at the electricity % consumed by Ireland's bit barns, for example. 21% of total at the latest).
One small side benefit is that modular Generation 3 nuclear reactor designs may get built since the FANGS have such deep pockets. Most of our nuclear reactor park is Gen 2, with active safety (loss of power => you're effed). I honestly have no idea how they plan to get safety approval, but they have the cash. MS is even committed to buy fusion power (hah!).
So they're talking up the fact that they've knocked up a shed out of construction plywood as though it's the second coming? FFS.
Now, if they'd done some useful, like killing off Recall and Coprolite, along with the people who came up with the ideas, then maybe I'd think they knew what they're doing.
So they're talking up the fact that they've knocked up a shed out of construction plywood
Sort of. Although generally, "construction plywood" refers to sheet timber, and CLT refers to structural beams -- the big rafters you see in old churches, or the steel you see in industrial buildings.
There are SO many things wrong with this. I won't even start on the whole anthro-CO2-based climate scam [that deserves its own topic].
* Cutting down trees that eat CO2 to reduce CO2 - WTF???
* Building with wood when data center fire danger is "a thing"
* Increasing the level of manual labor and land surface needed to build when steel+concrete buildings can be made TALLER (and ought to last longer)
* anyone considering the effect of termites and moisture on the structure? No?
There are good reasons industrial buildings use steel and concrete. Micros~1 "pipe dreamers" need to stop staring at their "narrow mind tall/skinny aspect ratio" 4 inch phones and see the ENTIRE picture, and not just the tiny narrow "4 incher" view on a 4 inch phone screen!!! [those of us who see the world in 'wide screen' can more easily see the big picture]
Of course it's greenwashing, probably driven by a combination of building costs and carbon credit arbitrage.
Bob, read up on a couple facts rather than talking out of your arse. I don't really care if you're convinced about climate change – there is enough variation in the last couple of thousand years to allow for discussion at least about how much, and, if we get another solar induced ice age or even just another Maunday Minimum, you can expect priorities to change swiftly – but you're badly wrong on ever other point.
>Cutting down trees that eat CO2 to reduce CO2 - WTF???
"Trees eat CO2" is a gross oversimplification. It's true enough for slogans and for kids, but not for serious talk. I think that our current tendency to get bored after reading more than four words in a row is a pretty large contributor to society's ills. Unfortunately, reality has no obligation to be describable by snappy soundbites alone.
In this specific case, cutting trees down to build something more durable than those trees (and no, not all trees live for centuries), and then replanting them, will reduce atmospheric CO2 more than leaving them alone. High school education and about thirty seconds of thinking should be enough to understand why.
Wood isn't flammable. It is considered combustible though.
In large chunks it genuinely doesn't burn, at least not until it's in conditions where steel would be collapsing, so kind of irrelevant at that point.
Timber also generally fails "nicely" in a fire, giving firefighters a decent amount of warning that it's going down so they can leave and damp down the mess afterwards.
I don't know whether this engineered plywood product retains those advantages though. Once you start adding glue almost all the behaviour depends on the glues and the layup.
That aside, for a building that will have very few people inside, only the insurance company should really care. As long as the people can easily leave in time, does it really matter if the building burns down?
OVH have refused to publish despite clearly knowing what happened, so nobody has learned anything.
That said, the firefighter report indicates it had no fire suppression, and there was an additional 3 hour delay to turn off the power before they could start attacking the fire.
As the building was designed with 1 hour firebreaks, it's not surprising that they failed.
I don't imagine laminated timber is going to be much of a Faraday cage nor much of conductor so I imagine some sort of foil shielding and lightening conductors are on the books.
Otherwise I could imagine some "citizen" not entirely enamored of MS Corp nor of AI generally, directing their army surplus radar onto one of these bit barns. :)
Why not go full hippy and use adobe (sun dried bricks = straw, muck and dirt ~ very MS I would have thought) or wattle and daub, or rammed earth? Compressed straw bales with concrete render are a thing. Given the unmanageable tsunami of discarded automobile tyres* why not use those in construction? (Has been done elsewhere.)
I don't imagine MS is fooling anyone with more than half a brain but then its probably only those deficient in the brains department that voluntarily purchase MS tat.
* even EVs use the same tyres whose production requires a considerable quantity of oil and energy without even considering the energy, oil, steel, concrete etc that is involved in the construction of roadways, bridges, tunnels etc
Otherwise I could imagine some "citizen" not entirely enamored of MS Corp nor of AI generally, directing their army surplus radar onto one of these bit barns. :)
I reckon a simple DoS using termites. MS finds some bugs in their bit barns as well as their code. Kinda curious how this will work out given floor loadings. Then again, shipyards regularly sit large ships (recently the battleship New Jersey) on wood blocks when they're in dry dock. But I've seen engineered wood beams being used in home building as an alternative to steel I-beams so for most of a bit-barn, it'll probably work.
...with cheap watercolors at that.
Build datacenter of wood to show eco-friendly-ness, to house a, checks notes, 100+MW (that's mega) machine room that creates nothing tangible, creates only a handful of jobs, and in no way benefits the average person and in fact, will be mostly used to oppress the average person.
Dollar Store paint greenwashing. With a large helping of oppression.
Fuck off M$.
The day I believe M$ is interested in "green" issues is the day they stop developing bloated, resource-hogging messy software that requires increasingly large amounts of resources to run....the short lifespan of the wooden building doesn't feel like it squares with any kind of sustainable thought, either.
Are we really supposed to believe fire resistance claims made by the building industry after Grenfell?
The linked website doesn't give me any confidence. They don't claim it won't burn, just that it'll last long enough to evacuate a building, assuming you over-specify the thickness correctly (go careful how you calculate bending loads). Even if it were extinguished, the building would probably need to be rebuilt.
>> They could just close their whole operation down.
Lots of your day-to-day stuff would stop working including government stuff (in UK and US). It would cost billions (including lost productivity) to shore-up unsupported systems and migrate to other OSs and cloud providers.
However the new providers will not produce the Windows desktop OS.
Seems that an even more "low carbon footprint" approach would be to not build a new building at all but to repurpose an existing, currently unused building.
The U.S. is full of under-utilized office buildings and out-of-business retail spaces. If they looked, odds are there is an out-of-business Kmart, Sears, an entire shopping mall, or a warehouse somewhere within 20 miles of wherever they need a new datacenter.
Timber not really a long-lasting construction material?
Well, the wall behind me is timber framed. We know when the timber was felled, and can safely assume the wall was built that year or the next.
Less confident about whether the watle and daub infill is original or not, but it may be.
The timber was felled in 1531.
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