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Could someone explain to me how these data centers use up water? Like is it evaporating? What happens to the water? I get the water consumption is very high but is the problem we're removing it from places that don't refill or does into the environment mean it's wastewater? Please someone help me understand.
I don't get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it's for cooling, but that doesn't destroy the water..
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
So assuming the datacenter uses the water for cooling, what happens to the water? Does it just get released as steam?
No wonder the government don't want anymore report on climate change.
Stinky teens need shirts that point the blame at Microsoft. Get ripe and hang out with old people.
Can't they just use seawater or use air cooling?
A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
Why can't they use the shit and piss water to cool their shit instead of asking people to cut back on water usage?
Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you're feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week's reminders.
Is cooling water not reusable? Shouldn't these be closed systems?
Apparently closed loop systems are not good enough for these kinds of applications, and often instead use evaporative. Which kind of logical, since they're not running a single factory overclocked GPU with a top of the line desktop CPU, but a cluster of factory overclocked GPUs with a server CPU.
So they build the computing centers in hot areas with water scarcity and make the air hot-humid?