Morning all, it’s me again. Here’s your 5-minute morning dose of news making you smarter about the infrastructure that’s building the future.

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• Cool Story Alert 🚨: Mini data center heating public pool

• Can boutique compete with the big boys?

• Just dropped: Hacked streaming accounts pricing 🚓

• Daily Dall-E 🎨

Est. Read Time: 3mins, 34seconds

Cool Story Alert: Tiny data center is being used to heat a public pool.

This one comes out of the UK. The Exmouth Leisure Center in the south of England has partnered with start-up Deep Green to use their washer machine-sized data center (deployed to allow clients the computing resources needed for AI and machine learning) to hear their pool.
This is kind of Deep Green’s schtick, and they’ve got at least 7 other public pools throughout the country ready to go for the same thing.

Everyone knows that data centers have a huge problem with heat. And, short of building their campuses in Siberia (which people are doing), operators are increasingly under pressure to look for out-of-the-box solutions to deal with the energy issues and the heat that it produces.
Hyperscalers in Denmark and Sweeden use their large data centers to power thousands of homes and schemes like this are becoming more frequent.

No doubt Deep Green’s solution to its energy use is gimmicky and probably unsustainable financially. But it’s encouraging to see these unique approaches to a problem the entire industry addresses every day.

Now if only data centers could solve the other issue with public pools…

More Good Stuff

The new guys are looking to make a splash in Virginia. A couple of freshly-funded aspiring hyperscalers (Powerhouse and Corscale) have started to set up shop in Data Center Alley. The developments prove that big institutional money is still ready to play in the crowded Loudon County sandbox.

Can boutique still compete with the big boys? The team at Roundhouse Digital hope so. These guys want to put a 10MW data center right in the port at Cascade Locks, north of Portland. Their goal is to become a niche provider of computing services for the government and the energy industry.

QCAAS (Quantum Computing as a Service) is now a thing… Quantum computing is incredibly complex (duh) and requires specific parameters to operate - so it’s not mass-produced. In steps Oxford Quantum:

They’re offering access to quantum computing capabilities via the cloud to enterprises and researchers needing to run sophisticated algorithms.
If there’s any sort of proliferation of this QCAAS model, we could see the computing power of the globe increase dramatically as institutions everywhere have quantum capabilities.

“Campus fabric workflow” looks to simplify campus networking. The new workflow from Juniper Networks aims to deploy a uniform, standards-based network fabric. This, coupled with AI-empowered data gathering, Juniper claims, will drastically improve and simplify deployment and network operations.

Microsoft agrees to switch its cooling methods in Goodyear, AZ. An agreement reached with the city mandates the tech giant to use air-cooling methods on all future area data centers. Citing concerns about water availability, the deal also requires Microsoft to pay nearly half of the planned $90 million wastewater treatment expansion on 157th Ave.
Here’s what’s absurd though: even with the agreement in place, Microsoft’s campus is projected to use 1.2 million gallons of water A DAY at full buildout! 🤯

Daily Dall-E 🖌️

Here’s what our buddy Dall-e thinks a data center heating a pool in England would look like as a sketch:

Audios, I hope you learned something. If you think this is valuable, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email and tell me what you think and how I could make this better.

PS: I thought this was funny. The team at AtlasVPN went out and found the average prices of paid-for streaming accounts on the dark web. Talk about a great piece of marketing…