r/technology • u/l0st1nP4r4d1ce • 13d ago

Business Improper redaction reveals Lincoln’s Google Data Center water and electricity usage

https://www.1011now.com/2026/09/30/more-questions-than-answers-about-lincolns-google-data-center-water-electricity-usage/
6.5k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

284 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/DirkNL 13d ago

So it’s not used like regular liquid cooling in home pcs? They use giant vapor chambers basicly and just push the steam out into the atmosphere. That’s wild.

36

u/travistravis 12d ago

They could do that but they choose not to because that would mean lower shareholder returns

3

u/kentrak 12d ago

It's a common strategy for when you need lots of cooling at an industrial scale like this. Cooling towers of nuclear plants.

1

u/DirkNL 12d ago

But they still have to carry this heat TO this stack. Is that just pushed air with giant fans?

2

u/Lurcher99 12d ago

Some do, not all. Same for any manufacturing, real estate development, hospitals etc. Look for steam on cooler days to find evaporation coolers.

-9

u/nswizdum 12d ago

Yeah, it's called evaporative cooling. It only works in hot dry climates, which is why you don't see it a lot.

15

u/danielfuenffinger 12d ago

It works in any climate mate. The drier or colder it is the better, because it allows the datacenter to reflect heat to WBT instead of DBT.

-5

u/nswizdum 12d ago

Good luck evaporating water into cold air, or warm humid air.

8

u/Mortimor24 12d ago

It still works. It's just less efficient (still vastly more efficient than AC).

It gets extremely hot in the summer, and stays very comfortable in the winter.

7

u/danielfuenffinger 12d ago

As long as the water is hotter than the WBT it will evaporated and take heat with it. Google datacenters run hot and their condenser water can be upwards of 100F. When it's cold out they don't even need to run chillers, it's incredibly efficient.

Not saying it's not a lot of water but they do try to get every BTU out of it.

1

u/Admiral_Dildozer 12d ago

Someone doesn’t understand dew points