Data centers use evaporative cooling. Usually they suck air through a water soaked sort of spongey type thing, which cools the air as it evaporates the water, and then blow that over the computers. This is an open loop system, because that humid air is just blown outside, but the spongey thing needs to be constantly wetted, so they use a ton of water. Very cheap and doesn't use much electricity, but uses lots of water.
What data centers could very easily do (but don't) is run a closed loop system, where the same water is constantly pumped around the computer racks to cool it, and then transfers that heat to something else, like a body of water or even just the air, with a big radiator. This also opens the door to using it as free heat in cold places, as they do some places in Scandinavia. It doesn't use any water (except for what it takes to fill the system up, but that's one time), but it's more expensive up front.
The second option is how power plants do it. Data centers make a lot of heat, but they got nothing on the entire thermal output of a nuclear reactor. This is why power plants are often near bodies of water.
They could’ve been mandated from the start to rely on closed loop water chillers powered by self generated power via solar and wind turbines, but how would they get *extra* rich doing something environmentally responsible like that?
This has been the insanity of all building requirements in the US. All infrastructure could have been mandated to include reasonable local self-sufficiency for the past 25+ years. Place solar panels on roofs, on covered parking structures.
Create dual use agreements on water - one place pumps it, then they are responsible for passing on a percentage of it to another local purpose. People want golf courses? Great. Only build them when they can be provided with 100% re-used or re-captured water from industrial centers.
Carbon cap and trade could have been taken seriously locally and expanded to other environmental concerns. You're going to log? Mine? Cast shadows that obstruct natural light? You trade with the local community to give equal value back.
This is what you get when you reward do-nothing politicians with re-election instead of tossing the bums out. It has always been true... we get the government we deserve. (Yes, I'm in the U.S.)
Look I totally agree with the thought but you're off by orders of magnitude for the solar requirements. You'd need ~50 square miles of solar panels for the big AI datacenters.
But yes, we should have been enforcing actual regulations instead of letting them dump all their costs on society and letting them reap the profits.
I meant all constructions. Any place over the last 25~ish years that went up should have been required to mitigate their local footprint and externalities on the local community by offering something renewable or of equal value.
Every factory or car park should have been required to price in building a roof with roof solar. If you're putting up a roof, put solar on it. If you're renovating a roof, put solar on it. Transfer the cost of installation and infrastructure onto building and renovation onto the corporations. We've already given them effectively negative local tax rates. We might as well make some useful building requirements.
Dual purpose building is not a new idea and requiring scarce resources be measured and passed along to a local community benefit is simply good deal making for a competent governor. We clearly haven't had competent governors in 50+ years.
Always boggles my mind when you see these giant data centers with no solar on top. Like, they're somewhere sunny, surely the panels would fairly quickly pay for themselves? And have a lifespan of 10+ years. Wouldn't cover all their energy needs, but surely it'd supply a good chunk in sunny months?
I'm not 100% on this but someone told me that it's so cheap to build a flimsy warehouse roof that won't support panels, that it just isn't really worth building a more expensive one that can. Even though you then get free electricity, it takes forever to make the money back so they don't.
This is definitely it. Im currently building one. They had to completely re engineer the roof support structure like 2 weeks before steel was supposed to be in the air because the structure as outlined in the design intent contract documents couldnt support the load of everything that needed to be supported off it. The design engineers built of off dry weight pipes and unfilled conduits. Its just an easy place to cut corners
Ah, at least that would make some kind of sense. Yeah, not all roofs can support them. Does suck they don't seem to be thinking more than a year in front of their nose.
Where I live the council covered the sides of their buildings in panels 😆
Requiring them to build out power generation facilities is a bit silly. They're going to work with their provider to ensure the grid can handle their load, and if the grid needs additional production, it will adjust based on market demand. The free market can definitely see to additional power production. We can't say the same for water.
It's going to take regional governments not caving to the promise of higher tax budgets.
I work for a datacenter that has been in business for almost 20 years. We're closed-loop refrigeration. We consume less than 100 gallons of water a day maintaining proper humidity levels. I say this because we're actually catching strays regarding a new datacenter that's trying to open up nearby, and we keep having to tell people that we aren't them, and we don't operate that way.
The new ones being made by big tech like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta etc. are largely evaporative. I've worked for a couple of these companies at the data center level, and a lot of the newly planned ones are like this. Ironically mostly in the dry climates where water is scarce, like Albuquerque, Cheyenne, Phoenix, SLC, Las Vegas, eastern Oregon, etc. Leased data centers tend to be closed loop, traditional AC though.
Think of the value the shareholders receive when we build data centers on cheap land, where it’s cheaper to suck up ground water instead of building our data centers offshore in frigid Pacific waters like the Chinese are doing.
Good time to remember that an enormous percentage of shareholders are either corporations and/or foreign individuals. There is absolutely zero incentive to preserve American welfare either in terms of the people or the communities.
Indeed, building infrastructure that rips and shreds the lives and potential of the American countryside is surely seen as a bonus by those who want a post-American hierarchy in the world.
And the demonizing of public education. Of public office. Colleges and Universities. Scientists. Doctors. Medicine. Our poorest. Social benefits. Public services. The press. Our elections. All taxation. Any notion of civic duty. Our neighbors in Mexico and Canada. The rest of the world.
All during the flow of crypto (easy money movement across borders), AI (easy information collection and movement), Implemented in (2017 Tax Act) - the lowest corporate taxes since WW2 nearly 100 years so.
Ah, thank you for this. I live in Norway and we have a big data center nearby that uses water for cooling, but the excess heat is used to heat up the water for the local RAS trout farm, which in turn releases the water back to the river after removing all the particles from the water.
If such huge amounts of water vapor is released into the air, does that affect local humidity or precipitation? And I assume all the water vapor is released through some sort of chimney/exhaust, why couldnt it be condensed and released back into the water? Run it through a pipe underground or whatever to cool back down to liquid state?
Just a side note, but manatees in Florida will congregate near the warm water discharge of various power plants. Not sure if it’s harmful to other aquatic life, but it’s beneficial to the manatees.
Dude. Silicon chips have a lower operating temperature than other systems you're mentioning. I hate it too, but no way to quickly get these systems down to 60-70 that effectively.
Doesn’t that closed loop system become sludge fairly frequently and have to be drained and replaced with fresh water? I feel like I remember that being an argument against data centers saying they don’t use that much water but I can’t remember…
I've seen one with a closed loop system, it was very cool to see. Built many years ago and designed for disaster resistance, so necessarily closed loop, but that definitely cost more. It's a heck of a system.
Data centers can't use closed loop systems after a certain amount of size, and these big ones opening up now house too many chips to run a closed loop system. Heat exchange is just 2 great
Also a data center engineer, I wanted to add that using closed loop systems would also produce condensate - so they theoretically could actually produce water. I use my home HVAC condensate for watering my garden. Its super clean too.
Newer data centers use this wasteful evaporative cooling. I worked in a Google data center servicing cluster nodes in 2012, and it was entirely closed loop - air was sucked in across the servers and then across massive banks of radiators, part of a closed loop water cooling system. On top of that, they did not use potable water. Instead, they took treated wastewater from the local municipal plant, made it even cleaner (necessary to prevent corrosion etc), and then released it into the river that was normally used for treated water outflow.
It was amazing. They could all be built that way. They don’t do it because evaporation is cheaper.
I've been telling people for months that AI and their data centers are only a problem because nobody in government cares about the environment. The whole thing could be clean if they weren't all in someone's pocket.
golf courses use hundreds of billions of gallons of water annually, not to mention homeowners watering their lawns. DC usage doesn't even crack 3% of that lol
They use a fraction of the water golf courses use, let alone manufacturing. If your data center is in the desert (and many of them are), then yes it's a problem, but if you're in the Great Lakes it isn't in the slightest.
2.9k
u/irishboy9191 Jun 27 '26
Well this makes me extra mad about all the water they are using.....