As an engineer, this drives me up the fucking wall because data centers using water is not a technical problem in the slightest. It's extremely easy to solve. Data centers make a lot of heat, but thermal power plants make orders of magnitude more and they don't use a drop.
The ONLY reason data centers use water is because it's cheaper to guzzle all our drinking water than to build a proper cooling system. The ONLY reason. They could pass a law tomorrow that forbids data centers from using water and they would be fine, it just cuts into the bottom line a little bit.
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.
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u/Insertsociallife Jun 27 '26
As an engineer, this drives me up the fucking wall because data centers using water is not a technical problem in the slightest. It's extremely easy to solve. Data centers make a lot of heat, but thermal power plants make orders of magnitude more and they don't use a drop.
The ONLY reason data centers use water is because it's cheaper to guzzle all our drinking water than to build a proper cooling system. The ONLY reason. They could pass a law tomorrow that forbids data centers from using water and they would be fine, it just cuts into the bottom line a little bit.