This deal is sketchy.
I support building sustainable data centres here, as a matter of economy and security.
However, EverWind is sketchy. Anthropic signing a 20 year commitment while fundraising on junk bonds (BB+) is sketchy.
Newfoundland revoked Everwind’s crown land contracts over failure to pay, this whole year they’ve been having requests for crown land denied over similar issues with failing to pay or build. So now this month they announce a pivot to AI. Where have we seen this before?
They’re US based, but government of Canada has been pumping hundreds of millions into them for years, then they never complete contracts or pay things back. Why do we keep dumping money into this shit?
Their green hydrogen project hasn’t been delivered, it’s being accused of green washing, and they were supposed to sell green ammonia to the EU but because it’s actually produced with coal power Europe backed out.
Basically we’ve paid them $300M to build a business where they pocket a 40% tax credit, then produce hydrogen with coal power, then sell it as green. And they took the money, bought some tug boats, and built zero turbines or ammonia or hydrogen plants.
Why isn’t the federal government just crown corp’ing this for the hundreds of millions they’re throwing in?
Here’s an article about those EverWind issues for anyone who wants to read more.
I’ll just throw in that the CEO is a Trump donor.
I knew this would happen. Some people will celebrate this. Bad bad news…
Ha. Ha. Ha.
EverWind Fuels will build and own the facility, while Anthropic will lease the first phase for a term of at least 20 years.
Anthropic won’t be here in 20 years.
No portable gas turbines, no evaporative cooling. Grid connected with planned wind, closed loop cooling. Wow. So it IS possible to build these things without them being horror shows for the people around them. Assuming residential buildings are far enough for the noise to not be an issue.
Not saying it’s necessarily a good idea to build it, but if someone decided to spend the money anyway - it may not be a horror show.
EverWind said it will use a closed-loop water-glycol system. The company’s preliminary estimate for water usage is an average of 100,000 litres per day for the first phase and 500,000 litres of water per day including both phases.
A “closed-loop” that uses 100,000 litres per day doesn’t sound that closed.
As for the wind power, Everwind doesn’t appear to have even started construction on any of its planned wind farms and it’s likely the data centre will be completed well before they get any wind power online.
And this is all in service to an American company, completely throwing away the “sovereignty” justification for local data centres.
There’s nothing sovereign abt this for sure.
Yeah, even with that water usage it’s tiny compared to evaporative. Even 500K per day is on the very low end of industrial plants water usage, from what I gather.
E: Also I don’t know if this 500K liters disappeara like it does with evaporation or whether it’s returned for treatment and reuse. I’d assume if it isn’t horribly poisoned with something like PFAS, it would be returned to the lake via the treatment plant.
Is 100000 liters/day the flow rate of the closed loop?
Maybe, no idea how that works exactly. Perhaps internal prop-glyc loop coupled with utility water via heat exchanger? Continuously draw water from the tap, run it through the heat exchanger till hot, then return it to the utility via the sewage drain?
Beats me but I’d assume if they’re adding stuff to the water and maybe treating it for their internal systems, it would make sense to recycle it internally and just top off for losses rather than some “total loss” system.
The article says “propylene glycol closed loop” so my most sane interpretation is that whatever cools the actual machines is that. Then whatever cools that propylene glycol should be the tap water. Kinda how some nukes are cooled. Inner water loop with that goes into the reactor, cools the core, gets irradiated, then that’s cooled by outer water loop that cools the inner loop water. That way radiation is kept from contaminating the water coming out of the reactor. The heat is tranferred from one loop into the other via heat exchanger.
If the DC is keeps the water and recycles it, they gotta reject the heat from it somehow, that would mean heat pumps. Maybe? That’s more energy and money tho.
If there’s a huge nerd with too much time among us, they could compute how much heat 100000 liters of cold water can absorb till they heat to “hot water.” Then cross reference that against the expected heat produced by the initial DC chip capacity and check whether the two numbers are within the realm of comparable per day. 🤭
Too bad its dedicated to an American company, therefore subject to American intelligence rules, and Anthropic is also a company with deeply worrying financial projections. A main perpetrator of hype and bubble. Too bad we can’t support the development of Canadian or at least open-source models.
“EverWind’s four wind farms would eventually support the data centre’s electricity needs, but existing generation on the provincial grid would be the primary supply initially.”
That means: “Mostly coal until say … 2050 because it’s a round number and by then, it won’t be our problem. Sure we could limit size of data centre to what wind power alone could handle today, but no.”
Is NS’s mix mostly coal? Haven’t checked.
E: Geez. Falling but yeah…
Here’s the planned change for what it’s worth:
Wait that is thebproposale the deity could be completely different.
Unfortunate
Be sure to get paid up front.
Fuck this crooked asshole and his liar crook business partners at Anthropic.
Sure makes more sense than arizona
Holy fuck…
