2025-04-10
38 分钟The Economist.
We're now going to go into the IT room and, as I said, it's going to be unpleasant.
If you're trying to think of places least suited to recording podcasts,
data centres would probably be right up there.
If you want ear protection, you can take it.
I recently visited a new one at CERN.
the world's biggest particle physics lab.
In the enormous building,
stacks and stacks of servers were flashing as they stored and processed data,
all in service of the thousands of scientists on site.
Wayne Salter, a manager at CERN's IT department, showed me around.
We have the cooled water which is used by then these large fan units.
These are the largest fan walls produced in Europe.
We have a potential of 2.5 megawatts of cooling for 2 megawatts of IT equipment.
And we blow the heated air through the fan walls,
through the heat exchangers to cool down to then go through the servers to cool them down.
Data centres similar to this one, but on a much, much larger scale, enable you to do,
well, Everything that you do online, from video streaming to banking, or asking ChatGPT a question.
Servers need energy to work, and as you heard, fans and running water to keep them cool.
More servers mean more energy and more of everything else to keep them running.