The average for farm land is around 500,000 gallons per acre per year. Using the same amount of water as 5,000 acres of farmland to run >25% of the nation’s cloud resources isn’t enormous. Not that they couldn’t do better.
Yeah, I’ve stopped pointing out how relatively insignificant the water use is on Lemmy. That fact isn’t met fondly here, usually.
My understanding is that a data center can be open loop or closed loop. Closed loop is like a water cooling pc with a radiator and you have to cool the water down to ambient temps. Open loop (or semi open loop) is more common which involves dumping hot water into the local sewer system or local waterways.
More data centers than you expect just dump the water rather than cool it down and reuse it.
AFAIK most datacenters use evaporative cooling so water simply evaporate and system has to be filled up again, other systems that are dumping water have issue with all kind of additives like anti corrosion, residual etc and water shouldn’t be just dumped but go through wastewater treatment
Yeah and I have little confidence the proper treatment will happen always.
Well it doesn’t because obviously it cost money, just recently there was a scandal with Musk collosus datacenter where they straight dumping toxic wastewater into neighborhood, because well, water treatment centre they’ve planned is too expensive
www.thecooldown.com/green-business/xai-water-recycling-facility-memphis-indefinitely-paused/
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-environmental-regulations
It seems like all of Musk’s companies have a habit of illegal dumping.
Or polluting black neighborhoods.
People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center “uses” water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water “use up” the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn’t it?
They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.
Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.
It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.
It’s closed loop.
There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.
I’d imagine DCs are doing it the cheapest way they can. But I think comparing the high rises to a DC doesn’t really work just due to the scale difference and the amount of heat needing removed. I’m sure there’s a way that it could be made something of a closed loop for DCs, but I’m guessing it would be a bit different if a process compared to high rises. I wouldn’t be surprised if a DC removed as much heat as a year of every high rise in NYC in a day or less…
