this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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I've never seen any of these articles explain what this means. How is generative AI "using up" water. When a search uses a liter or whatever of water, what is happening to this water?
This is just nonsense that makes me think the author doesn't know either.
Water is often used in cooling servers. But it's contained and reused. It doesn't go anywhere, it's the vehicle to move heat from the servers to wherever else. In a pipe. In a closed loop. All these doomsday AI articles act like water is being lost permanently due to the use of these servers. Even if the water was escaping the closed system...did no one pay attention to the water cycle unit in grade school?!
I work on chillers and if the cooling towers float valve isn’t adjusted right and it’s constantly pushing water out for a year without someone catching it, you would loose potentially 500,000 gallons a year or more, and that’s just one part. Granted it goes back into the city’s system but that’s our clean water that has to go into a treatment system taking time and resources. Every place is different but here in Arizona I would assume they use a similar commercial setup. The water to the building from the plant is a closed loop but that’s harder for the cooling towers to the chillers since it’s evaporative, which you don’t loose a lot of water but that’s assuming that everything is in working order and well maintained, and a lot of commercial facilities are cheap on maintenance and don’t like to fix things until it becomes a big issue. To be fair I think industrial only takes up 6% of water use but it’s still precious here.
https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/
I found that article really informative, TLDR: a lot of water is recycled and recirculated yes but not all. Also they sometimes evaporate water for cooling, and eventually the water does need replaced. I think the concerns were mostly scale and water increasing in conductivity over time.
It's not a sealed system like a personal computer uses. They're on a huge huge scale. They use evaporation / cooling towers. But those lose a certain amount of water to evaporation which needs to be replaced regularly.
just... use rain water and condensation pipes. Idk why that would be an issue at all
Because it's not using hot steam, but vapor, it's more like sweating.
The heat exchangers are sprayed with misted water, which evaporates and takes away heat. But the resulting vapor is still only slightly above ambient temperature and can't be reasonably condensated.
It also generates waste water that has to be sent to a treatment plant they can't dump it back into the environment because it's so concentrated with minerals