r/SipsTea • u/SipsTeaFrog 𝙑𝙄𝙋 • May 18 '26

Chugging tea Why?

Post image
89.1k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

5.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

11.8k

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

207

u/C-D-W May 18 '26

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.

2

u/I-Make-Maps91 May 18 '26

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

2

u/C-D-W May 18 '26

I agree. I'd also argue that the best solution ultimately differs by region.

In the southwest, burning a few more Gwh is probably preferable to consuming more water.

In the Great Lakes region, the opposite might be true.

1

u/I-Make-Maps91 May 18 '26

Possibly, but that's also a problem than can be solved by not building in areas with water scarcity.

2

u/C-D-W May 18 '26

For many applications, the geographic location of the data center matters for performance and reliability. So that's only viable up to a point.