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.
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.