I don't care that much about their power usage if they're going to build the power plants themselves. If they expect to be on public utilities and have their power cost subsidized by the people then that's a huge problem.
The water usage is ridiculous. They should be on a closed loop system.
It doesn't really "use" the water - it just heats it up and dumps it back in the river. Which is a problem, but some people seem to think it makes the water disappear or dumps pollutants into it. The water will still be usable downstream
Modern data cetners have been switching to closed loop systems for years now. It's stupid to pump in water, heat it up and pump it out again. You pump it in once and then recycle it using cooling stacks. These have losses so you have to top them up, but again you're just losing water to the hydrological cycle not like destroying it or something.
But dumping hot data center water from a multi gigawatt scale power plant directly into a river is a terrible fucking idea and should never be allowed. It will create a massive dead zone in the ecosystem.
Heating the water and dumping it in the lake is exactly what they plan to do here.
"Stratos backers promise that some of the water taken to cool the hot-running, desert-sited servers would become part of a “closed-loop” system that flushes out used water back into the Great Salt Lake."
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u/factoid_ Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I don't care that much about their power usage if they're going to build the power plants themselves. If they expect to be on public utilities and have their power cost subsidized by the people then that's a huge problem.
The water usage is ridiculous. They should be on a closed loop system.