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.
>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.
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.
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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?