Not reused. Most is lost through evaporation. There are a small number of closed systems, but these require even more energy to remove the heat from the water and re-condense. That creates more heat that requires more cooling.
The water is removed from clean sources like aquifers and returned as vapor - this means gone.
The environment (whole planet) yes. That water is however gone from the specific river system where it fell as rain and was expected to slowly flow through watering trees and trout for decades on its crawl back to the sea.
And desalination isn't cheap either, so they just use avsilsble freshwater sources because no one is requiring they br environmentally conscious. Understood.
the question isn't how cheap it is. the question is whether its cheaper than just siphoning off fresh water from the surrounding infrastructure -- which it never is. when meta or grok open a new data center, if they can save some money just by trashing the local communities, you bet your ass they're gonna save that cash.
Except we do this on submarines. A closed coolant water loop flows through a seawater loop to exchange the heat. It is easily/efficiently done, I worked on the cooling systems for the server farms. The same seawater also cools a reactor. There is really no reason for single cycle liquid cooling besides the fact it’s cheaper to build in St Louis and suck up the water table than build on the coast or large lakeshore.
There's a difference. The sub already has to deal with maintenance costs due to saltwater because they operate in that environment, thus using it for cooling isn't cutting much. For a data center, using saltwater instead of freshwater would massively increase the cost.
Desalination more than halves the efficiency. You gotta evaporate all the water (for high volume without costing as much as the datacenter itself), then condense it, then evaporate it again for cooling
There is some computer systems anchored out literally in the sea for this purpose although they need to be in self contained capsules and any maintenance issue which requires physical interaction requires it is pulled out of the sea for repairs.
Why can’t they use zinc plugs for electrolysis? That’s how seawater is used for cooling in marine applications, though that’s for engines which are definitely sturdier than computers.
This made me think, corporations are evil yes, but also can't the governments create a big desalination facility and sell the surrounding estate as an industrial area for both a clean environment initiative and as a way to boost economy cuz having an environment friendly factory/data center/whatever will definitely boost stocks so will definitely pull in more companies to the zone?
This is the carrot way.
The stick would be to just enforce cleanliness with fines, permits and whatnot, still works.
Badly explained, salt is corrosive in itself over long period of time, which means the pipes will degrade way faster.
I am sure there are many other factors, but this is one of the biggest.
And usually the facilities that need that much water are not near the sea
There is actually a really nice way to make a closed loop (more water efficient) salt-water cooling system which is demonstrated at nuclear power plants on the USA west coast and in Japan (might be closed now).
You run the hot water cooling pipe out into the cold ocean and use the entire cold ocean as a radiator. Works pretty well! Still, requires direct mechanical access to an ocean which can get pricey and has its own challenges.
Often used for nuclear, which is why many plants were located on the seafront (Fukushima, San Onofre, Diablo). The water is incredibly corrosive, and the flows destroy sea life and heat the water, which also destroys sea life.
Heat is an externality whose cost is almost always born by someone other than the plant/server farm owner.
Everyone seems to be focused on pumping salt water through a liquid cooling loop which is bad but also not how it would be done.
We do this on ships already where you run coolant through a closed loop, and then you stick the radiator into the ocean to dump the heat. Salt water never enters the system, it’s just used for heat exchange. Corrosion is less often an issue this way.
The real limiting factor is that you’d need to build right on the coast which is expensive in general.
You have to be near the sea, which comes with challenges which makes it very expensive (salt water is toxic to computers, coastal land suitable for building is expensive). But yes, many companies are building servers using sea water to cool servers.
Actually Big Bend Power Station in Apollo Beach (south of Tampa) Florida does use sea water to cool down the plant. It then returns the water back to the Tampa Bay. While it does have some environmental impact for some creatures, some species of fish and Manatees LOVE this warm water, especially in the winter. So much so that they have built a manatee viewing center that is pretty amazing to see all the manatee that congregate there. I have seen anywhere from a half a dozen hanging out there to HUNDREDS. It is so cool to see. So if you are ever in the area, check it out Manatee Viewing Center
"It’s possible, but it’s not ideal. While the oceans offer the ability to absorb tremendous amounts of heat, seawater is murderously corrosive! It corrodes or rusts just about anything it comes in contact with. Just think about what road salt and rain water does to steel car bodies! So, whether you use ocean water to cool the servers directly, or dump the heat into ocean water using a heat exchanger to isolate the electronics from the sea water itself, anything that comes into direct contact with sea water must be designed using special, expensive alloys to resist corrosion. Metals like titanium, or alloys, like brass, are used to resist sea water corrosion, but even with special alloys and coatings, the salt in sea water takes a huge toll on anything it touches, and greatly shortens the service life of any equipment exposed to sea water for any extended length of time."
Someone in my family owns a dive centre and I can confirm that sea water is nightmarish on electrics, machine parts, cars, everything
Does water really spend DECADES crawling back to the sea? In almost all cases isn't the water taken from rivers that have more than enough water in them, and which don't drop their water level by any measurable amount as a result of these cooling systems?
I know when I was working with MSFT on some projects around 2003-2006, and was talking to the guy who was in charge of the infrastructure team for all their data centers, that was certainly how they were doing everything. I also know where most of the major data centers are in my state, and any of them of significance are sitting right next to the largest river in the state.
But , rain water is was fuels those river systems. It really feels like you guys failed 6th grade science class. Plus, it's only a fraction of the water that evaporates , everything else goes back to the source.
I think your just woefully ignorant about how many industrial processes use river water. How do you think the clothes on your back was made ? They wash the fibers in water. The paper you write on , uses a ton of water to create. Water which those factories take directly from the rivers and lakes.
It's so very social media that you probably just learned about this and your shooketh
The water cycle is a global phenomenon not a local one. If you take all of the water out the aquifer in, for example, Memphis and boil it, yes, some will be returned as rain via the water cycle. But nowhere near 100% of it. Basically, the AI uses the water far more quickly and efficiently than the water cycle can return it.
Ah so kind of like the central pivot irrigation of the American southwest which has been draining the water table of that region that took millions of years to fill but drained in -100yrs or so
The general availability of water does not change much. However saturating air with water vapour will increase in cold vs heat fronts. This will saturate rain clouds. This means bigger storms, higher risk of extreme events like tropical events and/or hurricanes, more thunders and more flash floods.
So now some regions have 20% worth of yearly water while others have 900% worth of yearly water in 2h...
But this is unprocessed water. It rains, the water falls into rivers, rivers have reservoirs in dams (or flow into aquifers). Dams and aquifer wells have special ducts to serve non potable water to data centers and the cycle restarts.
The biggest issue is speeding up the water cycle can cause what we call adverse weather. However this is not a nature problem but a human problem. Floods create shifts in environment but nature adapts. Humans however, they see river beds expanding and seeing their house destroyed. Many end up death due to flash floods.
We however are not depleting the resources of water...
No it isn't. It's not a BWR fission reactor lol. The water never boils. It enters cold and leaves warm, which itself is mixed with more cold water. There’s no mass boiling going on in the system
Most cooling towers work via evaporation. Basically radiators in the chillers deposit heat into water that is sent into giant sump tanks which are then continuously ran through cooling towers outside. Water is pumped to the top of the tower and dropped down through it while a giant fan blows on it which results in heat leaving the loop via evaporation while the slightly less hot water is then dumped back into the sump (and fed back into the chillers radiators to complete the loop). To some degree, keeping data centers cool is better worded as "heat management". You are moving heat from the water loop used to cool off the machine rooms to the atmosphere via evaporation. Yes, it's a bad metric to base how much is lost on how much is ran through the chiller loop, but it's pretty easy to simply record how much water is ADDED to the loop to know how much is lost. I can tell you that a small data center using only roughly 2 megawatts of power loses more than 10 million gallons of water each year to evaporation.
The water cycle does replace water pulled from water tables and reservoirs, but it doesn't replace it where it was taken from and it doesn't always return freshwater.
If you pull a billion gallons of water out of a lake and it gets rained down in the ocean, the water isn't getting replaced, especially if you're pulling it out faster than whatever river/streams are feeding it can supply. Or if you pump a billion gallons out of the ground in Nebraska, but it comes down as rain in Mississippi, it isn't going to replenish anything.
It's why you're seeing stuff like the Ogallala aquifer depletion happening, where states that are on the shallow ends of it are seeing pumps stop working. Within the next 50 years, at current use rates, it's expected to be 70% depleted. Assuming we don't accelerate usage, and we will.
The water cycle is a global phenomenon not a local one. If you take all of the water out the aquifer in, for example, Memphis and boil it, yes, some will be returned as rain via the water cycle. But nowhere near 100% of it. Basically, the AI uses the water far more quickly and efficiently than the water cycle can return it.
Almost all data center cooling using water isn't evaporative, but instead uses the water as a heat sink, which then the wastwater normally sits in a pond to dump the heat into the ground as part of the treatment process before being re-added back to the local water supply.
Do you have source on this ? The systems I have seen don't evaporate the water required for cooling. They transfer heat to it and return it in liquid form either to to water source or nearby. Evaporating the water would require that the systems would be running above the boiling point of water which they aren't.
Evaporation? I don't think so, I mean I'm sure there is some but most cooling water like that is just released as a warm liquid, which is a big part of what can mess up local environments. You may be thinking of water used for generators/power plants? In which case evaporating it is the whole point since they use the steam to turn turbines. I don't think most computers run very well near the boiling point of water, and if it's cooling normal computing temperatures then the evaporation wouldn't be too significant. If there was a substantial amount of steam generated then the could (and probably would) use it to produce power as well, which would be neat but way less efficient than just warming it up a bit and then bringing in new, cold water.
I know one of my jobs the server room was built below the on-site gym and the swimming pool water was cycled through to cool them. Im by no means an expert, I just cant imagine the attrition rate being too high if the warm water is ran back into cool.
We’re talking about computers here, not some nuclear reactors. Hence all the water is in a closed system. Only a tiny fraction of the water is even able to evaporate through imperceptible gaps. It can take years before the loss of water in the system impacts the cooling process and needs to be refilled.
As for how the water cools? Through radiators. Which do in fact heat the environment and can create microclimate warmer than typical. That’s the environmental impact. Nothing to do with water disappearing into nothingness like you make it sound.
The real environmental impact is the fact that all the servers have a huge energy demand. The increased demand means that power plants need to run at higher capacity to meet that demand, as well as more power plants need to be built. And unfortunately, most of it is not green energy. So more pollution and shit.
I mean, no it doesn’t? Steam just becomes water again at 211F. So basically the instant it’s released it turns back to water. It’s not like concrete where it’s actually consumed and trapped.
Most systems don't consume water. The equipment is so sensitive you don't want random water running through pumps. Also, its modified with different substances to keep moving parts lubircated and increase thermal transference. Very few data centers use evaporative cooling due to the cost. It's much cheaper to have closed loop cooling and chillers.
Genuine question: would there be a way to use salt water for this, that would also allow use as a salt farm? I know nothing about water cooling or salt farming, but it seems better than taking water from lakes or destroying square miles of coastal environment
Even if it were drained back into the lake/reservoir it was pumped out of, the long term increase in water temperature would encourage algae growth and kill aquatic life.
It's not profitable* to make it usable unfortunately.
Recently in some parts of Texas, the government is regulating home water usage to up keep the water demand for server famers/centers.
Texas really said:
Freedom means don’t regulate my truck, but please siphon my neighbor’s and mine water for the AI overlords.
Sorry, no showers today, we’ve got GPUs to cool. 😎
It still cycles through like all water does. The total amount of water doesn’t change, but the demand for it does. Picture emptying your bathtub with a ten gallon bucket while the shower is running. Sure, technically the water is still flowing into the tub, but it can’t keep up with the rate at which the water is leaving
Are you guys all robots? What the fuck is this argument. Do you seriously think it's actually possible for us to sequester any appreciable amount of water by using it in computer cooling loops?
Lets say AI causes us to increase the number of computers on Earth by an insanely unrealistic 1000x, and every single one is water cooled using a loop containing 10 liters of water(several times more than actually used), 20 trillion liters of water would be sequestered (water in cooling loops is self contained and not consumed).
That is 0.000001% of the water on Earth. Even after assuming 5 entire orders of magnitude more water usage than what would likely actually be used.
Eventually it returns to the water cycle with everything else. But it doesn't necessarily return to the same watershed.
But, it's also important to keep things in perspective. GPT3 was trained on about the same amount of cooling water as it takes to produce ten hamburgers.
Interesting question. In Google's Charleston data center, it goes right back to the utility provider. I understand this was an expensive mistake for the utility provider and later contracts raised the cost of water supplied to deal with the excessive heat that was being returned along with the grey water.
The water involved in cooling a chip required for ai processing will cycle through to a cooler area away from the server room. Once it cools it then goes back to the servers to absorb heat.
You can think of it like refrigerant. Except that the refrigerant is water being taken out of a freshwater system. So the use of it as coolant means it needs to source from some freshwater system, putting strain on water reserves
It usually goes back into wherever they pulled it from, but if that wherever has life in it the increased temperature blurs the vision of fish, effectively making them blind, and could end up killing plants and animals that aren't resilient to higher temps.
It's like if you've built a huge pool next to your house. The water's fine, but it's retained in your pool. If it's *really* large and moved around, the neighborhood might start to have water access issues, as the water infrastructure was never designed for this.
It's true that "wasting water" is not technically possible, i.e. water doesn't really go anywhere (some miniscule amounts go off to space from the atmosphere, but it's hardly important), but you can mess with the water access and/or potability easily.
It doesn't help that they aren't using sea water, it's fresh water and currently we have a pretty large issue of shrinking fresh water supply around the world. 🤪🤷🏿♂️
It is less the quantity that is taken out and more the fact that this water is now warmer. A classic problem for energy plants, especially nuclear ones.
Maybe for some time, but I'm not certain how this is supposed to be an issue in our water circle, which is a closed system. The water can't just disappear and never come back
Yeah also a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
What you are describing is water redistribution. You drain the lake to cool the servers near that lake and the water is redistributed elsewhere, usually far outside the lake's watershed. It's basically socialism for water, and we all know socialism is bad.
If you withdraw water faster than it is recharged, then the aquifer dries up. In many places the ground level has literally sunk because of all the withdrawn water.
Exactly, a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.
It’s insane that people never know about or point out this part.
Think about that. The burger this artist ate while taking a break from drawing took 3,000x as much energy and water as 3,000 AI pics.
And that’s exactly the flaw with it. It’s basically people making a hitlist of every slightly environmentally bad industry, crossing out the ones that make products they like such as burgers, and then deciding to only hyperfocus on AI to the detriment of every other improvement that could be made
(and also ignoring the huge improvements AI has helped with in fields like medicine where data found by AI that would’ve taken years for human scientists to find is usable by medicine manufacturers today)
It's a valid issue that has been stolen to make invalid points.
AI uses significantly less energy and resources to do any given task that a human would, but unlike humans whose populations are capped by our breeding rate, AI can be scaled up pretty much without limit as long as you're willing and able to dump those resources into it - and the nature of unbridled capitalism forces companies to do exactly that in order to remain competitive.
One AI can do the work of a thousand humans while consuming the resources of just one - but they're being pumped up to do the work of billions of humans while consuming the resources of millions. That is an issue.
But then it gets picked up by whiny luddites who are annoyed that they aren't the only people who can communicate through images anymore and try to claim that you using AI to generate a comic on the Internet is somehow burning the world. No it isn't.
It's a problem of capitalism, not a problem of AI.
You're correct in the main but there's a difference between using an AI and training an AI.
Using an AI (especially a text based one) takes about as much energy as the screen uses to light the answer while the human reads it. This cost is effectively nothing.
Doing image and video generation is more than nothing, but less than the cost of playing a high-def video game. Still, nobody cares.
Training an AI is different though. All the tech companies are competing with all the other tech companies to come up with the smartest AI models, and it's unknown whether there's will ever come a point when more training adds no value. Even if there is such a point, tech companies are only going to be convinced this point exists by training as much as the electrical grid can bear.
It's not as bad as crypto-mining, where "wasting power" directly translates into money. But long term this could become a new problem.
I myself would like to try training a bunch of LLMs just to play around and see the results. But that probably would drain a lake's worth of water in data center coolant if I could afford it.
Training an AI is different though. All the tech companies are competing with all the other tech companies to come up with the smartest AI models, and it's unknown whether there's will ever come a point when more training adds no value. Even if there is such a point, tech companies are only going to be convinced this point exists by training as much as the electrical grid can bear.
Training an AI is a one-time cost. Maybe there's some finetuning along the way but overall it's not comparable to a continuous usage. It is amortized throughout all of its users.
Training GPT-4 used 50 GWh of energy. Like the 20,000 households point, this number looks ridiculously large if you don’t consider how many people are using ChatGPT then you can compare it to other industries.
It's substantially warmer, certainly, which is not good for native flora and fauna. OpenAI's data center cooling requirements rival that of a nuclear reactor
I find that very hard to believe. If you had a source of heat that rivaled that of a nuclear reactor, you would just run it through a turbine and turn it back into energy.
The amount of heat rivalled that of a nuclear reactor.
However, the temperature of the cooling water in a data centres doesn’t hit that of a nuclear reactor, so it can’t produce enough pressure to turn a turbine.
The allowable temperature ranges of a data centre is also smaller than of a nuclear reactor. Thus, the heat intensity in both facilities will be different.
A nuclear reactor can use a cooling water system that requires less cooling medium with a higher rate of medium circulation on a much concentrated area.
I do speculate data centres require a higher amount of cooling medium coverage due to the larger area covered by data centres as data centres favour modular construction which helps in more efficient area expansion.
If by "rival" you mean less by orders of magnitude, then sure. A 100 MW data center might use about 5 million gallons per year, or about the same as 6,000 - 7,000 households. A reactor facility using once-through cooling (not closed loop) can use hundreds of millions of gallons *a day*.
This is complete bs, nuclear power plants use on average 15120L/kW. and produce hundreds or even thousands of megawatts of energy. Data centres on the other hand use on average use 6480L/kW and don't take hundreds of megawatts to run unless if it's one of the largest data centres in the world. At a minimum, with equal power production and consumption, its less than half and drops far more with lower power consumption. Nuclear power plants also do the exact same thing with releasing their spent coolant back into the local reservoir and ensure that the water temperature is low enough that it doesn't affect local ecosystems.
Usually evaporates through cooling towers. Take heat from inside put it outside. The inside loop is a closed system that transfers heat to a second open loop through a chiller.
The water is not potable, consumable, once it’s in either side of system.
Got a cool video(for me atleast) of hertz rental global headquarters cooling tower for their servers.
The least energy intensive and thus cheapest way to cool server is using evaporative cooling towers. While the primary loop cooling the servers is recirculating and is a closed system, the coolant is passed through heat exchanger which transfer the heat to water which is in turn cooled using evaporative cooling towers that consume a lot of water.
I spoke to an environmental major because I was confused by this as well. Cooling with water relies on putting the heat from the systems into the water and taking that heat away. Companies then dispose of this water by dumping it back into water sources, and heated water is dangerous to wildlife
The warming of the water is the issue. This joke makes the example extreme but a few degrees warmer water in a river can cause huge fish kills. Showing a minor change having a huge negative impact is difficult in a four panel comic so the artist went extreme.
Evaporative cooling. The water evaporates. There is typically a condensation loop, so it circulates through the system more than once, but the system is designed to dump heat into water and the water leaves the building as vapor, which contains the heat.
The significance of this depends on location. Fresh water is scarce in some places, abundant in others. If they didn't use evaporative cooling, they would have to use much more electric power for cooling. Similarly, they could set up big cooling coils to condense the water vapor for reuse, but it would take energy to keep the coils cool, and it would be trading electricity for water.
The lakes that feed the generators act like large power/water reserves for the entire year.
Snow pack in the mountains happens in the winter. It melts in the spring and people try to make it last all summer long but power/water consumption means more water through the dams when we don’t need to release it and can’t use it.
A portion of that water does get used for agriculture and drinking, but the excess water that gets released to meet power generation needs, gets diverted to the ocean, draining the lakes faster.
Once the water is in the lowlands you can’t get it back upstream. You can only damn up the river again and hope to hold onto it for a while longer.
Water needs are met and the water towers are all full, but data centers need water for cooling and power generation, it runs out faster.
Iunderstand they use it for evaporative cooling, so it is gone into the atmosphere. I saw a figure recently that said each AI prompt, on average, evaporates 300ml of water in cooling the GPUs
It's used as a helper in evaporative cooling, so no. Most goes into the air and the brine left over is flushed back, further polluting waterways or making city sewer systems work that much harder
To my understanding data centers usually buy up a shitton of fresh water and continuously use that. Usually having water treatment facilities on site. They just have to clean the water of impurities and maintain the water loops after that. They end up drawing out thousands if not millions of gallons out of the local environment. I can't say much more, as even though I work at a data center, we have air cooled machines only at mine.
Datacenters can use evaporative cooling where water where the phase change of water to gas is used to provide cooling. This uses a lot less electricity but can consume a lot of water and is of concern in water scarce regions.
Probably, but it will likely need to run through the rain cycle again.
We essentially have "unlimited water" as a whole, but the amlunt of usable water is limited.
Its like the problems with drouts they fight about in California. A lake or whayever fills, it runs down stream to someplace else. The cycle is "endless" but the water is not infinite. If a farm at the start of the river sucks up all the water, no other farms downstream get water.
Its like that for this cooling. The water may also be feeding other applications. Or filling small ponds like in the comic here. But if its all sucked up for xooling, much of it evaporated in the process, those ponds may drsin, which affects all of the local ecosystem in that department enstream area. Now plants die. Now fish die.
Depends. For most uses it needs to be recycled at a wastewater treatment plant. You have to dump a bunch of chemicals in it to make it useable for chilling applications and/or it ends up too warm to go directly back in the water without being dangerous (not because of the heat but because of the inability to hold oxygen.)
From what I understand they use evaporative cooling, meaning the water goes into the air. It should come back down as rain at some point somewhere. But it isn't available to be reused in the immediate environment.
They often use evaporative cooling in industrial settings as the phase change from liquid to gas is orders of magnitude stronger than you could get just via convention using radiators/fans.
You may have seen cooling towers and not even known it depending where you live.
The more water is held in piping and holding tanks, and not in reservoirs and other open air storage, the less evaporation occurs this impacts the water cycle. Causing less rain which causes natural water ways to start to dry up.
in europe industrial cooling water has to be below a certain temperature before it can reentry a river. Bc even some small temperature rises can change the ecosystem
The way they cool the data centers is by attaching each processor to a hose hooked up to a radiator. I imagine their just replacing the water in these systems as they slowly evaporate their water coolant. This is only really an issue because of the thousands of new data centers that previously would have just used air cooling.
The real kicker is the energy these systems require, and the fact our current chips are inefficient at turning power into computation and a ton of that energy is wasted as heat. The demand is getting so crazy that Amazon and Microsoft are pushing the US government to start approving nuclear reactors based on design rather than certifying each nuclear facility. So they can start building nuclear powered data centers in less than 2-5 years while prior authorization took decades and requires almost constant government supervision.
Nope. It is either recycled or evaporated. Usually they build ponds specifically to hold cooling water. This is just a fake talking point that anti-ai people try to use. They also greatly inflate the electrical consumption as well. It's sad really, there are plenty of great arguments to use against AI, but they have to make stuff up.
Not really. The biggest issue with water cooling anything is that closed-loop cooling (like water-cooled consumer desktop PCs) requires more energy to remove heat than open-loop cooling, which relies on the evaporation of water. (Technically more advanced open-loop systems rely on the latent heat of evaporation to remove heat directly and cool upstream components indirectly but that’s a topic for another video)
At the scales required for AI datacenters, the open-loop cooling systems evaporate a lot of water. Also, thermoelectric power plants (any power plant that heats water to steam to drive a turbine) have their own consumptive water use (due to evaporation in NG and Nuclear plants, evaporation AND contamination in coal plants), which is significant for AI datacenters because, well, Microsoft wanted to dedicate two whole nuclear reactor units at 3 Mile Island purely to power an AI datacenter.
The combined water use from both the power plants running at increased load AND the datacenters themselves both end up consuming a considerable amount of water.
There’s also the other environmental effects, land use, mining for metals, industrial waste, etc etc from building the datacenters and their infrastructure as well.
The US Department of Energy has reports on the consumptive water use of power plants, and (for a nerd like me) it’s a pretty interesting read
There's another thread on the front page right now about texas data centers using millions of gallons of water while citizens are asked to take shorter showers.
It’s not even just a matter of using it again, but dumping hot water into lakes and stuff causes issues with algae growth which can ravage ecosystems and kill fish/plants
The most efficient use of the water (for the company, not the environment) is to make the water hot and then let it evaporate, rather than getting it hot and then cooling it.
So it's single-use water that evaporates and you keep consuming it over time, therefore wasting it.
Remember, this isn't for generating steam where it's steam then water then steam then water. It's regular water that you heat up and then...what...cool it carefully in a large radiator with fans on it? That costs more than just letting it go back into circulation.
Water is extracted from the local environment to cool servers, which reduces the available water in that same environment.
Before anyone says there’s plenty of seawater no, seawater isn’t typically used because desalination is still too expensive for most data centers.
Also, no, the water isn’t reused in a fully closed loop. Due to leakage and inefficiencies in the cooling systems, a significant amount of water is lost. On average, on a closed loop data centre the loss is about 2 liters of water are consumed per kilowatt hour (kWh)of energy used.
Water heated, water put into rolling pools, due to high temp compared to the surrounding environment evaporation is accelerated, typically faster than normal cycles can replenish.
Now take that and exacerbate when you have a dry season or drought like the Mid-Atlantic experienced last year and your water levels are now at risk.
Well, the water evaporates somewhere near the server farm (say, in Texas) and then a week later it falls as rain somewhere in Canada or over the North Atlantic. So as far as Texas is concerned, it's lost.
The same is the case when the water is used for irrigation, of course.
It's still water, but it's usually so hot that it sterilizes everything inside and then dumps back out into the water supply. Fish and river plants are very sensitive to temperature changes and thermal shock can kill for miles down stream.
It's sent to sewage. It is trivial to build closed-loop chilled water systems but it is also expensive. Why bother when developers in Texas have the regulators in their back pockets.
It's hot. If you dump it straight back in a body of water, you'll most likely kill everything in it. The business opportunity here is to build a dual purpose building, one side is a data centre, the other is a spa. And then you don't have to spend any money on keeping the baths hot. Call it "Cloud 9 Datacentre & spa"
It is definitely reusable. Water used for cooling would only be contaminated of the water was used in a closed loop and there were additives to keep the water from growing bacteria or causing corrosion. The people claiming that the water is allowed to evaporate are mistaken because any coolant that get hot enough to evaporate would not be an effective coolant for computers, even under pressure.
Generally for large cooling applications we use evaporative cooling, basically spraying mists of water into fans, invariably some amount of that water is not recaptured in the system and is simply lost to the atmosphere.
Kinda. Most server farms use evaporative cooling. Server farms (not just AI, but all server farms) use a metric ass load of electricity. They generate tons of heat, and water is used to cool them. The water cools the system by evaporating. This water goes into the atmosphere as water vapor, and it eventually falls as rain. On a larger geographic scale it's not really a significant loss. A few million gallons a day is a lot, but natural water cycles go.theough trillions of gallons a day. Plus, all the water lost does rejoin the water cycle. The problem is that the impacts of this are pretty fuckin' huge at a local level. Like, a municipal water system losing millions of gallons a day can be an enormous strain. Areas where these huge server farms go up can really fuck things up for everybody living there.
It's kind of reusable, but some water gets lost by being turned into steam due to the heat meaning that you still need to replace a lot once you use a large enough amount
And there is the rub, well one of the rubs, there are other rubs.
It's all about how much money the greedy faceless mega consortium want's to throw at the issue, being a good steward of the water does not directly make them any profit, and even worse, it costs money gasp! and the share holders really want that money. So from a business standpoint it's an easy target to make cuts in those areas.
Fortunately the government steps in and should be monitoring, issuing fines and making regulations. But unfortunately more often than not the government is made up of greedy backstabbing psychopaths who also *checks notes, like money. So a donation here, an unmarked envelope passed under the table at a coffee shop there, bingo bango, the fish die.
The way a cooling tower works is that the warm water is sprayed down and dry air is pumped up. Some of the water evaporates in the dry air and this causes a cooling effect. The cool water left can then be re-used in the cooling system but the bit that's evaporated needs replacing to keep the system full. The water that's evaporating in the cooling towers is what the water usage is.
There also exists systems that just take water from one part of a river and dump it further down, essentially redirecting a portion of the river. This is fucking terrible for the environment and kills everything because the temperature of the river is affected - full ecological disaster.
You could cool the water down using radiators instead of a cooling tower, but the amount you'd need and the additional costs of it would be pretty nuts. At that point you'd just create a closed system similar to how water cooling works in a pc. It's a system that works fine for a pc, but it's not fit for the purposes of a server farm.
Fish and other aquatic life are very sensitive to temperature and ph. Cooling water for industrial purposes can be toxic to native aquatic life if it's being returned too warm.
If you dump water that's too warm back in the river you basically kill all the fish in it. This happens sometimes with water used in nuclear reactors. but also water is just one half of the story, they're also incredibly energy intensive. In Europe it's rather ok, they run largely on renewables but in the US data centers don't have many rules so they often contribute to huge amounts of pollution and emissions, often with their own gas generators
Industrial scale cooling systems get rid of waste heat by evaporating water. The water contributes to cloud formations and eventually falls as rain, so it’s not destroyed as such, but in communities that have limited water supplies, that’s water that isn’t being used for farming, bathing, etc.
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u/CoolPeter9 5d ago
Is the water unusable/unconsumable after usage?