alt Hacker NewsI’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…)
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
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I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs.
The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things.
Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4].
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s
[3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
[4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta...