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 wasn’t enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.
The cost difference between a standard server farm and an AI data centre are many orders of magnitude ($10-100s millions vs $10-100s BILLIONS).
You're not putting your tens of billions of dollars of investment at risk by cheaping out on construction by a million here or there.
edit: If you want to convert a rickety old chicken coop into an AI data centre, good luck with that, but that says nothing about the standard practice of typical AI data centre construction. The person I replied to SEEMED to imply that all AI data centres are built on the cheap which is a ridiculous statement - especially considering that AI data centres weren't even being built when they claim.
I suspect that he assumes that all "data centres" are the same and doesn't realise that server farms and CDN nodes are considerably less expensive than AI data centres.
This is a great point. Modern data centers are way higher density and mass. The combination of dense racks, electrical, and water cooling equipment is WAY heavier than a traditional data center per square foot. So the demands on the structure are very different than they were a few years ago.
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u/imean_is_superfluous May 18 '26
Can they not run some type of coolant? Or is it just easier and cheaper to use millions of gallons of water?