Here in drought-stricken Texas, water use and availability are becoming (or have become) hot political issues. At odds with that is our burgeoning high-tech industry. Enter data centers.
Apparently data centers use up a lot of water. I mean, they use a truly mind-numbing amount of water. My question is, simply, why? I get that computers and such can generate a lot of heat and that some medium needs to be used to absorb and dissipate that heat. Water is usually pretty good at that. But why do data centers consume water? It seems to me that the water should be circulated through the facility to absorb excess heat, then sent someplace where it can expel that heat into the environment (or use the heat for some other productive work), then returned to the facility to do it all again. Once the water is installed into the system, why would the water be consumed? Why can’t it be recycled pretty much endlessly?
In a similar vein, is there any truth that an AI search or whatever consumes X gallons of water? If I do one of those stupid AI pictures on Facebook, am I really destroying a measurable amount of water? Why?
They use evaporative cooling.
Basically it all comes down to money.
Closed systems cost more and require more maintenance. It is significantly less expensive to use evaporative cooling.
It’s not a direct relationship where one AI search consumes X amount of water. A data center runs a whole bunch of computers, and those computers all generate heat, and that heat requires a whole bunch of cooling. If you divide the number of of AI searches or whatever by the overall amount of water used during the same time period, you get an X amount of water per search. But it’s not like if you do one less search you use X less water. It’s the overall heat load that you need to be concerned with.
In other words, it’s averages, not per unit.
The water is never really “gone” but it is removed from the area so others can not use it.
Evaporative cooling means the water goes into the air and blows away. No longer of use to others who live there. The water is still on the planet but moving around. Sure, some comes back as rain and re-fills reservoirs and such but the data centers tend to extract a lot more than comes back in the same time.
About the evaporative cooling, that Reddit thread points out that the evaporated water also is used in humidifying the air, since dry air with static electricity isn’t a good thing to have with electronics.