The guy selling his shit to companies to build the data center is the big money winner. Those things have huge amounts of copper.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
428 points (95.3% liked)
Fuck AI
7192 readers
1664 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I imagine pouring salt in the water tanks for their cooling systems. It'll make a giant expensive mess and potentially could shut down the datacenter for a while for repairs
Im confused, what will salt do. My brain basically autocorrected it to suger cause you can put it in concrete and it will ruin it but what does salt do?
I think the idea is to put salt in their cooling water intake and hope it corrodes something important?
Ah okay but at that point you could do something more destructive. Strange meme
During WW2, guards in the New York City subway system had a standing order to shoot on site anyone who came down a certain elevator holding a bucket of sand.
The subway is powered by DC rather than AC electricity. Today solid-state converters are used. But back then, the only option was direct mechanical conversion. Literally a giant AC motor connected to a DC generator. An AC motor was powered by the grid, and its drive shaft was joined to the shaft of a DC generator, which energized the lines of the subway.
But it represented a single point of failure. This one crucial machine was powering the whole subway system. And all it would take is one person throwing a single bucket of sand into the contraption to cause the whole NYC subway system to grind to a halt. Oh, and NYC was the primary port city for American troops and supplies going back and forth to Europe.
Neat
I don’t think it’d even work. I wouldn’t be surprised if their cooling water is distilled in the process, so the salt would just get filtered out.
On boats we literally use sea water to cool things and distill it on the ship. Data centers can surely do the same thing
I feel like boats are probably better equipped to deal with sea water than data centers but I might be wrong
I mean they could be, but there’s nothing stopping the ultra rich from spending less than one dinners’ worth of money on a salt water distillation system for the money printer
You underestimate how much billionaires cut costs. Water distillation? That could be 1 more gpu.
There are some exploding rockets that can show you examples.
Not a bad point
load more comments
(1 replies)
https://www.quora.com/Salt-Concrete-Does-adding-salt-to-concrete-make-it-1-4-x-stronger Imma leave that here.
Salt does bad things to concrete but you'd need more than that.
A year or 2 ago, some assholes were shooting substation in the hopes of causing major damage. Im sure data centers got a smaller version of this
Those 5 green blocks are radiators. One of those assholes shot and damage a few of the radiators at a critical substation. It caused power loss to about 7k people including schools and a hospital. The news story said they had to truck in temp substations until they got the new parts to repair. ETA was 6 months to a year.
Sorry, kinda went on a tangent. Good luck with your AI recipe that uses 5 gallons of salt or whatever.
I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about a Ukranian tactic of drone plus thermite bucket.
You can get fine aluminum and iron oxide powder online easily. A sparkler sets it off or even a superheated wire.
The Ukrainians have been having great success at using thermite to forcibly evict Russians from their trenches, and sometimes, from their mortal coils as well.
Probably a bad idea to buy it online.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Funny those guys seem to have returned to their hedge now that Trump is back in power.
Why shoot substation for free when ICE will pay them to shoot minorities and their supporters instead.
I doubt their schedule is so busy they couldn't do both.
My views of eco terrorism are mostly from reading Zodiac : an ecothriller. The protagonist uses quick acting cement to plug polluting sewage pipes and back up the toxic waste into the polluting facilities.
This could be done in the opposite direction as well. Plug the incoming water pipe to starve the beast pulling hundreds of thousand of liters of water.
Holy shit do NOT DO THIS.
You're assuming the failure point is going to be inside of the facility but it's WAY more likely to be an underground pipe that will speed that that sewage directly into the earth.
This is way worse because it might not be obvious that it's happening for a looong time.
Seriously, find some other way to ecoterrorize. This one is not worth it.
Unplugging a pipe is easy
Unknowingly having salt water corrode your cooking system over time is a disaster
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
They don't just blindly use whatever water comes from the lake and put it directly into the loop.
They'll have treatment, filtration, and cossosion-resistant parts, and probably separated loops where the only liquid that directly interacts with anything important is completely isolated from the intake and outflow water.
Yeah but isn't that also an easy fix for the datacenter? Like the people running it will just shut things down, discover the cement, remove it, and start up again.
I think the hope is that the lack of water for cooling will cause permanent damage by overheating. But the reality is there are failsafes to prevent this.
That is what I figured. Gotta do something with lasting consequences like mixing sugar into the cement.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think OP has a $20 bucket of salt and is farming ideas for how to use it to destroy his local datacenter.
$20 bucket of salt? That's way too much for salt. Who's your salt guy?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm confuse
Yeah ... I'm really not sure how you're supposed to destroy a data center with a single bucket of salt.
But I'm willing to learn.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
This is just like the Romans.
Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.
Good thinking.
The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.
The real solutions are always in the comments smh
view more: next ›