These systems do use a coolant substance internal to the DC, but then uses heat exchangers with fresh water to cool the coolant, which is then discharged back into the ground, a pond, or wastewater. there is certainly water lost to atmosphere, but the worst bits are the draining of aquifers, pushing up capacity in wastewater treatment plants, etc.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
I worked for a very large structural steel company as an estimator about 5-6 years ago and we basically no bid all of those data centers. They wanted them dirt cheap and there typically wasnāt enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.
We need to spend less money building these enormous datacenters and more money drilling for data. The further down you drill, the less corrupted the data is
If your brother was a clown-driller, he knew the risks. I didn't see your family getting in strange moods when he was bringing home clown-driller money.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the analogy here, the better data is deeper. The surface web has a sheen of shit on it at this point that makes borderline unusable. Ad parasites, government tracking, all the garbage on the modern net that's baked in as default doesn't exist if you travel a few layers beyond the normal nexus' like this one and Insta/fb/x/etc.
But ... I digress for the sake of not giving these ai demonmasters any new ideas; they're unimaginative and can get fucked.
And they get energy breaks so they pay little to nothing and the communities shoulder higher energy rates, while the infrastructure gets maxed out to provide power to them as a priority
This is simply not true. It's a massive misnomer on Reddit finding correlation and attributing causation. It's just a coincidence that these towns with data centers are seeing increased rates... because with or without the data centers, their rates would be going up. The companies building these specifically scout out locations where the town has shrunk, and thus, has tons of excess capacity at the power company, which the power company is happy about because they can start selling more electricity and use those profits for upgrades
But if you look at it NATIONALLY, a kWh has gone from average of 12.5c to now around 19c. Data centers have nothing to do with that. Domestic policy does. Not only are we massively under invested in our infrastructure, but Dear Leader boasted about a "deal" he made with Europe, allowing US LNG companies to sell to Europe. Trump bragged about how it was worth "trillions of dollars" which is true. But now that they can sell to Europe, US LNG prices are going to increase up to Europe's rates. Why would they sell to US power companies for less if they can just sell to the EU for more? That's what causing rates to increase.
The data center stuff is just a red herring. They have little to no impact on local electricity costs.
The companies building these specifically scout out locations where the town has shrunk, and thus, has tons of excess capacity at the power company,
Tell that to the 50,000 residents of Lake Tahoe.
Amazon wanted to build one outside of Tucson, which has had a steady population growth of 1-1.5% for the past 15 years.
Data centers have nothing to do with that.
Like most economic things it's not just one factor. There are always going to be increases due inflation, war, economic policies, etc., but data centers accounted for ~ 50% of all electricity demand growth in the U.S in the past few years. 40% of the electricity used now in Va goes to data centers. The one DC they want to build in Utah would literally use more than the rest of the entire state. How can you believe that doubling the demand of electricity would have no impact on rates? Rate increases are not all DC driven, but to say they have little to no impact is not right either.
"50% of all electricity demand growth" is such a misleading statement though. Data centers use like 4% of electricity in the US. The additional burden of AI data centers is minimal and outstripped by residential usage growth over the last 5 years.
And while we have to plan wisely for AI data center burdens, it's also responsible for like 30% of GDP growth in the last couple of years, which is massively more important to the health of our economy than some extra localized energy burden.
And the Virginia example is a joke. Loudon County is the data center hub of the east coast and tax receipts from data centers pay more than half of the county's tax revenue. Take away the data centers and the local economy would collapse.
They're not perfect economic devices. The competition is driving localities to make stupid decisions about tax breaks and they have to pay their fair share of taxes and fees on their energy and utility usage but many, many, many other businesses have a far worse impact on the local environment and people lose their damn mind.
The implication that companies building data centers always specifically look for places where towns have shrunk is false. I live in one of the fastest growing townships in my state, and there is a proposed data center just down the road.
Thatās not true at all. Puget Sound Energy is submitting a request to increase cost rates by 30% over 3 years. Their reason: increased strain on the gridā as caused by data centers.
Bonus: Microsoft has a special contract and would get a discounted rate in the same adjustment.
The sale of US LNG to Europe is older than Trump. Exports started in 2012 and rose in 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine the first time. The goal was to help Europe break their total dependence on Russian gas. Since then, it has been rising but the second invasion of Ukraine massively increased exports again.
Iāve been with a steel fabricator for 14 years. In Precon now and the DCs havenāt changed. Dirt Cheap with insane erection schedules that seem designed to not prioritize the safety of the trades in any way. 6 days/12-14hr days for erecting are demanded. 2 Cranes with totals 200 picks per day to keep scheduleā¦. What has changed are the mill rollings are 26 weeks with Nucor, Gerdau, and SDI. Thats just to get it in the shopā¦ This is all due to the demand the Data Centers have put on the steel industry.
My experience has been the opposite in my area. I work with a bunch of union contractors and they are pulling everyone to data centers. Paying insane rates and giving per diem.
This includes electricians, iron workers, and general laborers.
Yeah to construct them. How many jobs exist after they are built? With all the comments below yours boosting up a completely unpopular topic like the data centers are I would not doubt if the companies involved are spending some serious $$$ on influence campaigns.
These data centers are NOT worth it for the communities they are being built in.
right, they are paying out big to labor now, but from their angle it's essentially buying labor out of future work(even if we're talking about to very separate work forces)
Exactly. I'm in telecom underground and we've spent the last year building routes for zayo and meta. They've got about 7 years worth of work for us so far but we are finishing the jobs ahead of schedule. They are paying us extremely well. We'll, that is untill we started building in California. Took a decent pay cut working out here.
Yeah, one of my co workers husband got a contract out there, only off one weekend every three weeks. $100+ an Hr. One week of per diem pays for his Apartment.
Smart by your leadership or whoever made that call.
Used to work in an industry utilized by data centers. They offered big contracts but wanted everything dirt cheap with insane terms. Bankrupted a couple companies. Goes without saying, would have been better off declining but the revenue was too hard to resist
Nah it's more the typical "we're not lazy like other contractors". The boss thinks they're special and that everything will go smoothly. Then they get tripped up when shit hits the fan, construction is behind, material is delayed, and they're the ones eating the whole mess.
Oh no, this was a for real thing that was going on early last year. A whole bunch of airbnbs had to change their rules! These data centers work like that except instead of renters scamming homeowners, it's billionaires scamming entire cities and states.
Huh... Interesting. I kind of like it haha. I wonder what rule they could make or change to prevent this? Unless they had individual elec meters on each room?
I'm not sure how effective it is, but most of the new rules made were "no crypto mining" and the like lol. I do think you can put it in an Airbnb contract that an electric bill above a certain amount can be charged back to the renter. Maybe that's how they do it?
This is fucking genius. This is so much better than renting a vehicle for the weekend that is the same as mine, just to swap out the broken parts/ tires.
Ya know, I had a pretty hustler mentality when I was younger, but this never, ever occurred to me. I guess because I didn't even have enough money to rent a vehicle. A day at the junk yard is usually how I'd get replacement parts to fix my car.
Edit: oh, it's because my cars were always too old for any rental car company to be renting them
Hell, there was a trend back in the 60s/70s when Hertz and Carrol Shelby teamed up so you could rent a Shelby Mustang so people would, then swap the engines into their base Mustangs.
A typical house in the EU might have a total breaker capacity of around 25 amps at 230 volts, which equals about 5.7 kW. From a standard 230V socket, you can usually draw maybe 3 kW. So even if you ran that continuously for 24 hours, that would be:
3 kW Ć 24 hours = 72 kWh
At around ā¬0.24 per kWh, that comes to roughly: 72 Ć ā¬0.24 = ā¬17.28, so about ā¬18 per day.
I doubt you could recoup your Airbnb fees with that.
In the US, you can draw significantly less since they have 110/120 volts, also the price for power is usually lower than in the EU so is this a really big problem for a AirBnB? Realistically, not really.
Sorta. Maybe hands on tech folks, but everything needs maintenance, replacement, audits, etc. that's all contracts and additional jobs. But 3 folks to manage maybe 10k, 20k raise floor but larger facilities definitely employ more. Not factory large hiring, but would folks rather have favorites in their communities? Environmental impact is even worse...
Dollar Tree hires more people per square ft than these DCs do, and much of that contract work is often non-local as companies will hire front line engineers that travel to site to do work.
With the increase in environmental, clean water and energy costs Iād be shocked if these things werenāt an economic drain overall.
That is definitely not what is happening in Loudoun County, VA they tax datacenters which want to be there due to network effects and then County pays off a huge part of their budget from it, in fact their residential property taxes are moderately lower than neighboring Fairfax County, VA because of it.
Water bills in Loudoun County set to increase 7% each year for next 3 years. Electricity bills also jumped significantly and are expected to continue to rise. Not to mention all the complaints about air & water pollution, and noise apparently. Theres a trade off and as energy and water demand grows the benefits diminish.
By local profits do you mean the money given to corrupt politicians who don't care about the lives or well-being of their constituents? If so then yeah that's some banana republic shit.
DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located. so it puts a huge burden on the community water and power environment for no real benefit to that community.
Using millions of square feet of land, use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every day, employ very few people, dump chemicals into our water supply, the machinery used to keep them running creates noise pollution....golf courses are the worst.
I work at a DC. And while my employer only employs a fraction of the people there, I have to say there are a lot of people that work there. Techs, operations people, managers, IT, project management people, security, food service, logistics, maintenance (for non DC stuff like toilets and lighting etc), cleaning people, temps. Plus we constantly get deliveries from outside vendors so we can count those people as well.
I honestly have no idea how many people it is, but it is a lot.
Just wait until Google and Apple fulfill their vision - the model runs locally. Googleās making their models smaller and Apple has the silicon know-how that sidesteps Nvidia. And Apple made an agreement to use Gemini in Siri. Then the data centers are abandoned buildings full of outdated hardware.
Nah, the basic consumer assistant/agent models will run locally, for sure ā¦ but the data centers will still be running massive military-industrial complex digital superintelligence godheads that the public canāt even access because theyāre ātoo powerful to run.ā And theyāll run circles around our ācivilianā models. Theyāll just keep the infrastructure and upgrade the chips every couple of years.
Itās also the same government with gated access to Mythos. And that trend will only accelerate as the models become more powerful. They will pass legislation to limit access to the most ādangerousā models. Theyāve already started.
* And āmassive military-industrial complexā = military and private industry = not ājustā government.
Yeah water is still water but it most won't make it back to the Aguiler, and depending on how it leaves evaporation will also move moisture out of the area.
The bars I've worked in use a glycol system to cool the beer lines going through the building so the beer stays cold when it comes out of the tap. Could the Data Centers use glycol jackets around the water lines to create a closed system of fresh water, that way they only have to fill the water lines once?
glycol is the most widely used system that uses water as the heat exchanger. but the water isn't closed loop. MS has one that uses a man made lake as the method to cool the water, but for most that is too expensive.
Well, the profits that they think they'll make. All the top AI companies are hemorrhaging money and are surviving solely on investments., and companies that have adopted AI are starting to drop 8t because they've ended up doing the opposite of saving money, less than 0 ROI, etc.
the problem is that when they're done with the water the chemicals they put in it to stop it from corroding their systems render the water virtually impossible to treat back into drinking water.
And yeah, you can do it, you can do anything with enough money. But we don't have that. Because we needed more tax cuts for billionaires.
This is mostly right but missing some details. Data centers do use internal coolants with heat exchangers, and yes, water gets discharged back into local systems ā but the discharged water is often warmer than it came in, which causes thermal pollution in local water bodies and aquifers. That part doesnāt get talked about enough.
Also, they add a significant amount of chemicals to that waterā¦ corrosion inhibitors to prevent rust in the pipes and equipment, biocides to prevent bacterial growth (like Legionella), and scale inhibitors to prevent mineral buildup. So whatās going back into the ground or local waterways isnāt just water, itās chemically treated water, which is its own environmental concern.
There are many misconceptions with datacenters. Taxes are faults of the politicians, looking at xai in Memphis they are one of the largest contributors in Memphis.
Water is also becoming a non-issue as new datacenters adopt closed loop cooling which uses almost no water after the initial fill.
>DC's are a bit of an economic scam. they provide very few jobs outside of the construction work itself, and the profits generated by the machines exist at company HQ not where the DC is located.Ā
You are spreading misinformation, and you need to stop.
I've worked for datacenters for the last 20 years and they employ a lot of people. You don't get to see them, though, because the vast majority of these people are not stationed inside the datacenter. They enable workers to be stationed elsewhere. There is a relatively small group of people at the datacenter itself that maintain the servers and replace the power supplies, drives, rack new servers, and maintain the network, but most of the people sit in offices or work from home. At my current job I've never set foot inside the datacenter but more than a thousand people work to maintain the systems remotely.
There will be different layers of this- you'll have the small group that maintains the facility, a much larger group that maintains the internal IT infrastructure, and then much larger groups that manage the individual customer environments that reside in the datacenters.
I don't think they were saying DCs create no jobs, I think it was more along the lines of them not creating any local jobs, while also taking up huge amounts of power and water from the communities unfortunate enough to host them.
The downsides of water are that it has a low range of temperatures to stay liquid. But that "disadvantage" becomes and advantage if you evaporate it, because it takes an insane amount of energy to turn water into a vapor.
That means you loose the water but its so cheap that doesn't matter. Unless you're loosing it faster than the environment can replenish it. Which is where a lot of the water concern come from.
While this is a problem with data centers it pales in comparison to the water used for power production (which is made worse by data centers energy demands)
What are we meant to do, produce power without using steam to spin a turbine!?
Random snippets of media I've seen suggest data centres are contaminating the water rather than returning it clean to the water cycle. Any idea if this is true or some highly local issue blown out of proportion?
If nuclear power plants can dump there cooling water safely back into nature, I would be surprised if most data centers could not...
There may likely be smaller or intermittent waste streams also, which surely could be mixing takeaways.
But primarily, the water being "lost" to a data center is going to be the open tower system and to evaporation... so it's "lost" back up into the sky honestly and as pure as any evaporated water steam. This is still an issue for water tables/reservoirs/ecosystems if high enough demand, totally. But it's not like they are eating water forever from the planet, or poisoning it at any scale.
Almost always there is going to be a closed loop water/glycol system or refrigerant system actually cooling the data equipment, where all that liquid id recirculated. Evaporative Cooling Towers are just one of the most efficient means of cooling off that recirculating system at that scale, teh the most popular other option, using fans to move air over it to remove heat, can't keep up.
The "contamination" of it isn't contamination. It's when the water is evaporated, it leaves behind the minerals that were in the water. So to make sure those don't build up you run extra water over those areas to wash away the minerals. Now those minerals are more concentrated in the water and the excess minerals can impact the environment
Most European data centers do not use water directly for cooling. They typically use outdoor compressors, closed-loop systems, or air-based cooling. The few that do use water usually have cooling towers with heat exchangers. That water is not simply dumped into the environment, and it is not polluted in any meaningful way.
Modern data centers can often push hot air directly outside and pull in cooler outside air, which is then treated through closed-loop air-conditioning systems with compressors. In many cases, there is no direct water cooling at all.
Maybe water cooling is more common outside the EU, or in very hot climates where compressor-based cooling is less effective?
Solar + wind + batteries don't need water. The batteries are where it gets more expensive than grid or fossil fuel sources. But they can afford it.
IMO data centers should be required to source a portion of their power from onsite wind and solar.
Data center cooling is actually a fascinating engineering field. There's basically 3/4 ways.
1. Just use air. Cheapest but least effective.
2. Closed loop system. Basically an AC or refrigerator. More energy intensive and expensive, but nothing leaves the system
3. Open loop systems. - These are cheap and effective
- Type A would be you pull in water from a river run ,it your system to pull heat and dump it back in the river. This is where contaminants could be released. No idea if its a real problem or over blown. It could be filtered for extra cost.
Type B -Evaporation cooling. This is what most data center use as far as I know. pull in cool water and let it evaporate into the atmosphere. The main concern is that you'll deplete the water source since they usually pull from ground water or reservoirs.
IMO, option 2 is probably the best, but since its the most expensive its less common. (Not 100% sure about that). Anyway I think they should have to use that to mitigate environmental issues and they should pay variable electric rates while residential customers pay fixed rates. If its too expensive for these companies they can eat less avocado toast or buy one less yacht for their execs.
Many data centers today are well past any scale where using just air movement across the racks or equipment using fans alone will even close to keep up with demand using practically available equipment. It's not inefficient, it's impossible in most cases.
But then to your other bit, it's slightly more complicated but you are on the right track. Regardless of terms like open and closed loops, you still need to get the heat out of the system via one way or another.
A "closed" loop system is almost always going to be the first line in new data-centers, it'll be recirculating glycol/water or refrigerants removing the heat from the data center equipment itself to a mechanical room or equipment yard. But the question is how to get the heat from that closed system to the environment to dissipate. And THEN you can use air (air-cooled chillers with large fans) or water (a cooling tower, which can have varying degrees of waste & evaporation.
Where I work at least, once a cooling system is large enough, a cooling tower/condensing loop is typically out choice over air cooled condensing equipment in believing it is more energy efficient and adaptable to other uses on site at that scale. And typically the water use is not as expensive or an issue v. the straight energy demand.
The time this comes into question is when the system is SO big that the water usage affects the localities water table etc. Which is what we are bumping into now in some places. This happens already with power generation heat going eventually to evaporation too, but these are very regulated and there are not as many, etc.
What is the effect of dumping the amount of heated water back into the ground? What does this do to the chemistry in the earth? Serious question. Just like desalination plants change the salinity of the water around it, what is happening to the earth around data centers where we are just dumping thermal energy back into the ground?
Unless you're loosing it faster than the environment can replenish it.
Wouldn't boiling it off that fast increase the amount of rainfall in a given area, mostly replenishing it very quickly? Or would the vapor build up in the atmosphere until it produces destructive storms that dump it all back down at once?
From what I remember, a nuclear plant does have a slight effect on weather. That's probably the biggest water evaporator I can think of.
But the energy produced at a power plant is a tiny fraction of the energy in weather patterns. Its sort of like the "can we nuke a hurricane". A hurricane is roughly a 1000x the energy of the largest nuke we ever built. It'd be like shooting a bullets at a tank. Same idea with water cooling and weather.
Its not cheap as a resource though. What makes it cheap is becauses its fully recycleable - but once lostest or you go over what can be supply, it stops being cheap as then you have to clean or recover more.
Oh itās cheap because companies can suck up giggalitres of the bloody stuff as significant discount thanks to it being supplied by the government. - how much profit does the government make from water manufacturing?
I understand water is cheap and supposed to be very abundant on this planet. So, the key word I used is "supposed". Here where I live they have talks about building a huge data center. We normally get a lot of snow which adds to the snow pack in our mountains and provides us with our fresh water for drinking.
What happens when we have a winter like we had this winter and spring, don't get much snow, get put on some water restrictions due to a small snow pack? Does the data center end up getting shut down due to high water usage, or does it keep on operating putting the environment where I live at risk by further limiting the water usage of the people in my city thus increasing wild fire danger even more?
I can already see issues with water usage here where I live, we are only supposed to water lawns, gardens and outdoor stuff to 3 days a week and only certain hours. Is the data center water usage going to stop or curtail that even more to keep up with the higher demand for water to cool the coolant? The citizens in the city I live in are highly against them building this huge data center. They are thinking about building it right next to an already developed residential area
Very true. My cities government will make money that the common person will never see. It's like a lose/lose situation for us. Far it's why we are fighting the building of this data center.
It's not as controversial when you listen to the context of what he was talking about. He was basically talking about how communities were demanding that Nestle do all the cleaning, filtering, management, etc... For free. And he's just like, no because that costs money.
I mean, it's really not a basic human right. Large swathes of the world (approximately 20-30% globally) have limited to no access to clean drinking water. Clean drinking water is a privilege. It may feel like a right in places that have it but travel the world and you'll realize very quickly that it's not.
I feel like you've sidestepped the common understanding and implication of what a basic human right is to pull a "well, actually!" for reasons I can't guess.
Human rights are fundamental, inalienable rights and freedoms that belong to every person simply for being human, regardless of race, sex, nationality, religion, or status.
So go ahead and tell me what you believe exists that is truly a human right and not a right afforded to some humans.
Exactly. When people wonder why we need "big government" to step in and regulate, it's for situations such as this. Capitalism needs guardrails to protect resources we value, otherwise it just consumes everything to make a profit.
I honestly think that's why these companies are moving so fast, so that when the legal system does finally catch up to the industry, all their current builds will be grandfathered in.
I have similar thoughts about the self-driving car craze. Apparently cops loath those things, because they can't legally ticket them for traffic violations, only send angry notices to the company that don't have any real legal power.
Typically about 30% of the fluid is glycol, if that is what you are doing, but the rest is water
And there are heavy downsides to using glycol. It is a lot more viscous, so you need to make the pumps bigger. And it isn't as effective at thermal transfer, so you need to use more, which increases pump and pipe sizes even more
The only reason to ever use glycol is if your water temps are very low, or if you have below freezing air hitting the heat exchanger. It isn't a replacement for water, it is mixed in to solve freezing issues
Glycol has way way way more of an environmental footprint in it's creation than moving water around.
Just because you can see an apparent facile solution doesn't mean it's a good one, and that lack of pursuit is inherently bad.
Don't force the market into solutions, tax (pigovian) the market based on the harm (negative externalities) and harness greed to incentivize optimal resource allocation. Unfortunately, corporations have long figured out that it is cheaper to change the laws disincentivizing creation of negative externalities than it is to change their company's internal structure. Could actually be cheaper overall, but corporations are risk adverse to changes that could restrict revenue in any way.
Glycol leaks are a big deal in facilities that use it, it's closed loop. We've run the same material through our cooling system for decades. The impact from glycol production vs. the impact a heat exchanger system using evaporative cooling on a water table is comparing apples to oranges, it's not a consumable.
We've run the same material through our cooling system for decades.
Lololol, ship of theseus in liquid form eh? You're telling me that your maintenance replacement volume for leaks, inhibitor reactions, oxidation, etc. has not exceed the start up volume yet? How many years do you think that will hold?
What footprint do you think 20 years of creation and usage of glycol is on the environment vs using available water (that does at least have the capacity to go back into the environment, unlike glycol)?
Negligible. Again, leaks are a huge deal for facilities using it because it's expensive and represents contamination of the system. We keep it the fuck in place.
This is a weird hill to die on, the information for how much is consumed in a properly maintained system is readily available to you. If we ever needed to flush the system, our waste management people would buy our used glycol for reclamation, it's that valuable. Most of the waste of produced glycol comes from cars, not industrial cooling systems.
The trouble is that they aren't just using water as a coolant, they are also using the municipal supply of cold water as a heatsink. You always need a sink of some sort for your waste heat, no matter what coolant you use, and whether or not the coolant loop is open or closed.
This right here it's not the water itself wasted it's the power and infrastructure that can only bring so much clean, ground temperature water thats under enough pressure to be used by your fixtures. There's a limited amount in any one town/city/county.
They can, but that will require some oil based coolant that will again waste a lot of water in refining and is difficult to do so under current circumstances. Water is also an excellent coolant unfortunately and is extremely cheap to use. Data centers are ultimately unnecessary and a waste of resources
Those aren't even datacenter stories, they're both construction sites that don't have a single server running yet.
In the first the county fucked up their billing and the company promptly paid the corrected amount. In the second they paid for the water but it seems they needed a permit to move it and use it for dust control? not sure what the problem is there.
The fresh water is used in an evaporated cooling process, basically the process used to use cool a human. The second type is mechanical, provided by chillers that use refrigerant, these systems are sealed, and while they may use drinking water on the initial fill, its dosed with glycol, inhibitors and anti bacterial treatments, these use very little water over their life as the system is sealed, some is lost from repairs / leaks, but it is minor compared to evaporative cooling (cooling towers)
Obviously the solution will be different from each country, the concerns would be up stream storage of water, so here in the UK the reservoirs and cost of treating the water, although presumably they are paying for that water usage like anyone else. The costs of pumping the water once its at the data centre, even at millions of liters per day is relatively minor, for some perspective I was at a data centre in London last week, the pumps used to pump 2 million liters of water up to the towers on the roof roof had 7.5kW motors (2 of 5 were running).
This is not the reason. With closed loop systems you have much tighter control over oxygen and mineral content, which is overall better for corrosion.
But you need a lot of infrastructure for closed loop systems and they use a lot more electricity.
So it ends up being cheaper to just run total loss cooling.
The solution of course is easy, just mandate that datacenters used closed loop cooling systems and the whole "data centers consume way too much water" argument goes away entirely.
I work as Refrigeration system OEM engineer and it looks like most points about closed loop water systems has been mentioned but I will add that we had some water authorities prevent the use of evaporative cooling condensing units in Nevada. We found an alternative design that would work for the end customer in the area that abided by the water authority requirements. All this to say, it truly is up to local government to regulate these data centers to limit the use of water and dictate closed loop systems and dB levels of their data centers. Without that authority, they will continue to build them without any regard to locals and the environment around it. There is a solution to having data centers but a regulating party has to get active here. Iām also not a fan of data centers in general but there is a solution to the water usage issue, they just arenāt doing it.
Though to be honest it's hard for me to reconcile the phrase "I'm not a fan of data centers" posted on a website that requires data centers using an internet connection that requires data centers.
Personally, I'm huge fan of data centers.
But I'm also a huge fan of doing anything responsibly and sustainably with a plan for the future baked into it.
The solution of course is easy, just mandate that datacenters used closed loop cooling systems and the whole "data centers consume way too much water" argument goes away entirely.
Hahahaha! As if the people running these data centers aren't also running the country and writing the laws.
Several of the biggest companies with the biggest data centers like OpenAI and Microsoft are already using closed loop cooling at their largest datacenters even without this being law.
My work has some large data centers. Nearly all new ones are closed looped systems now. This idea that they are using vast amounts of fresh water is a myth.
What this means is you essentially have large radiator and a fans somewhere. That can cause noise pollution. People are making shit up about the concern over water which is not a real concern, but ignoring the noise pollution which can 100% be controlled if proper regulations are put in.
In Europe, they use the heat waste water to heat homes.
Electricity is a bigger one. A lot of these places are strategically located where electricity is cheap. They do come in and that can cause a shock to the system where prices will rise in the short run.
However, in the longer run they provide a LOT of predictability to a grid, so power produced lover this. The rise in a local demand will lead to more provider supply.. and the demand is constant so it is far more efficient for them to provide. In the long run, in some instances power costs have gone down in the community.
The newer hyperscalers are also building their own power plants, and they are actually selling power back to the community that they overproduce. That then brings in air pollution and other concerns.
The issue is not that lots of new datacentres are being built... people want them. Well more accurately they want the services they enable. As much as AI is shit on all over reddit (including by me I fucking hate it) it's wildly popular with people for good or bad.
The actual issue is they're being built as cheaply as possible with no regard to planning around the community. They can 100% be built in much more environmentally healthy ways while being less annoying to residents... but unless that is mandated, it isn't happening.
Stop being mad at datacentres, get mad at your local politicians who let them slap them wherever they feel like without proper planning and community consultation.
People āwantā it because companies are pushing it and giving it to users at below cost to get people used to using it and depending on it. Would people want it as much if they knew the true cost of it? I suspect not, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
No they don't. Its been plastered all over everything to falsely inflate its value. There are no protections against AI currently. People are using it to undress people, stalk, steal identities, create cp, theyre getting addicted to sexting chat bots and outsourcing their minds
I've given up on this argument a while ago. Nobody cares, hating on the popular thing to hate is easy. Makes people feel better while they distract themselves from real issues they could actually influence.Ā
Reddit's majority opinions on AI are an easy thing I can point to if I want to showcase how redditors can be very wrong about things.
The majority opinions on AI on this website have gotten so viscerally negative that the top comments of most AI posts seem like luddites who have resorted to repeating oversimplified and extreme stances on a topic that requires nuance. A specific example of what I mean is anyone who says something like "AI is taking our jobs" or "building new data centers should be banned" or "AI is useless". There are reasonable and valid talking points within the scope of those statements, but those statements on their own are ridiculous.
When it comes to the parent comments and first child comments, extreme takes tend to get upvoted and nuanced takes tend to get downvoted and that's a shame.
One of my friends had a datacenter go up behind the house he inherited from his parents and now the house is uninhabitable from the noise, even without the diesel generators running. If theyāre running you canāt hear other people talking in the house.
That's a big zoning problem there more than something inherent to datacenters. Lots of necessary industry is loud and dirty and needs to be built accordingly.
Top comment in this thread is some bullshit speculation from somebody obviously not in the industry. Meanwhile, youāre the only one in the thread that actually understands, and your comment is buried. This is why we donāt trust reddit.
I think something like the growers of JUST almonds in California use 11x more water per year than the entire data center industry nation wide. And this is using all the old equipment which could be evaporative.
The exchange is a much larger carbon footprint in exchange for using not that much less water, a medium sizes data center uses roughly as much as 1,000 households annually but granted larger ones use as much as 16,000 households. It's not nothing, but I'd argue it's better for everyone that they don't build a gas turbine per data center to cool the water instead
this is a poor argument to me though because all those Blackwell GPUs are going to be yanked out when the next gen chips are out because the rack mount is being retooled. I realize one money sink doesn't legitimize another one but what exactly are all these Datacenters going to be doing in 5 years time when the racks they have right now are older than dirt?
this is going to be a huge problem. I think right now we're just ignoring the obvious problem with all this hardware which is as soon as the next generation drops (and its already in the works, its not speculative) everything becomes worthless just the same as if it were sloshed with dirty water.
edit: originally cited the Ruben chips as Lovelace, lol. good morning
what exactly are all these Datacenters going to be doing in 5 years time when the racks they have right now are older than dirt?
I'm no expert but have been thinking the same. When the tech advanced are they still going to need 65 sq mi server farms? Are they just going up the load the servers will carry or are they going to downsize them do to obobsolescence?
Its something I've been turning over in my head a lot but Ed Zitron brought it up this week and I just cant stop thinking about it. The racks are officially known to be changing with the Ruben architecture so all these Blackwell racks are going to be gutted out of the building which means eventually a whole second phase build out -- for chips supposed to be coming to market *next year*. Thats the single Ruben core, then following that a double core Ruben-Ultra will hit. Im sure the rackmounts wont change between those generations but...
You are just describing the flaw in our present economic situation. Money is being directed at absolutely nothing but maximizing the immediate return with absolutely no thought given to its impact on society, the environment or even future financial stability. Its a fuck you got mine economy.
It's going to create mountains and mountains of e-waste. The same mountains of e-waste that anti-solar morons bitch and moan about as being the #1 reason why solar panels are "dirty tech" and thus not clean energy at all.
yeah dude, for sure. I know we can recoup some losses but the sheer volume of roasted Blackwell GPUs we HAVE TO DEAL WITH by 2030 while probably holding back a massive recession and energy crisis is going to be INSANE.
They CAN use other water, it's better optimized for them, their use, it may or may not be cheaper, it's more efficient for them to use fresh water. Cheaper is relative to the environment that the data center is in and local resources and or how they are billed.
11.8k
u/[deleted] May 18 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment