I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.
A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.
Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as “consumed” by the data center despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.
They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.
The reason that they don’t is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.
If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn’t be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.
This is a very solvable issue… even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It’s just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.
so those datacenters Iran is blowing up in the desert then… hooray?
Yeah.
I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.
i just wish we had a good way of using, i dunno, seawater or something.
A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.
Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as “consumed” by the data center despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.
They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.
The reason that they don’t is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.
If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn’t be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.
This is a very solvable issue… even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It’s just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.