They absolutely do. CPUs and GPUs are regularly water-cooled in data centers because it allows much higher density of equipment. The server’s power supplies, storage, and voltage regulators are mostly still air cooled, so there’s still the traditional “hot side” and “cold side” of air conditioning the servers, but there’s also water feeds and manifolds for the liquid cooling sides.
And keep in mind that it’s not just pristine pipes that the water touches. There are also the pumps with a lot of moving parts that degrade over time, and which can introduce contamination from lubricants.
“exponential growth” sounds really scary, so it’s a good thing that’s not actually true.
Just as “Peak Oil” was shown to be a debunked theory that was really more about the underlying and very real harms of the fossil fuel economy, the data center resource panic is mostly about other underlying concerns (some of which are legit, some not so much).
If it were any other sort of factory that uses a million dollars a day, with guys in hardhats going in and out from 9-5 signaling “normal people have jobs here”, everyone would be cheering for it and trying to take credit for it. But datacenters aren’t legible like that, so they catch a lot of FUD.
That’s not municipal water, though.
That will be part of a closed loop and generally contains fluid. This fluid can be water but usually not. Certainly not municipal water. It isn’t openly flowing across the gear. That cooling loop goes out to a heat exchange. That heat exchange will involve municipal water but not in direct contact (see the diagram above - it’s more or less what happens).
There is also immersion cooling, but that’s usually not water, either, and still involves a heat exchange loop. And none of those fluids are in direct contact with municipal water, either.
Setting aside the jobs argument, I agree that datacenters shouldn’t be getting any special tax abatement at all. While I don’t think they’re unreasonable resource hogs, they do use local power and water, and they should pay maximum utility rates for that, as well as maximum tax rates that help upkeep the systems they depend on. Datacenters can and should be a cash cow for the municipalities that host them.
If anybody wants to be mad about datacenters, be mad about them not paying their fair share of taxes and utilities (to whatever extent that’s true locally, b/c it differs).
How so? Just because it didn’t happen as quickly or as severely as predicted, that doesn’t mean it’s not valid. Also we just started another war over oil, showing just how volatile of an energy source it is (literally and figuratively).
I wonder if those data centers doing computing/storage “in the cloud” might actually be a net decrease in electricity use compared to the tasks being spread across tens of millions of home computers. (Not to mention the power used on all of the jobs where the meatbags have been replaced.)
You just literally did the behavior that I called out. Peak Oil (at least the argument of peak supply) has been debunked. You’re then trying to support it with the nonsequitur that another oil war happened. That’s the entire suite of fallacious arguments right there in one post. You’re conflating your objections to bad international policy with the (debunked) idea that the supply of available oil has somehow peaked.
We should stop fighting over oil because war is wrong. We should stop using oil because it’s harming the climate. You don’t have to reach for a bogus “peak oil” theory for any of that.
Likewise, datacenters can be regulated and taxed as the productive businesses that they are. If that’s not being done, it’s wrong and harmful. We don’t have to pretend like they’re some kind of exponentially increasing water vortex. It’s a business that has externalities that should be paid for via appropriate taxes and utility rates, end of story.
Right, I was responding specifically to RitterSport’s post #12 and the follow ups which sounded to me like running the municipal water directly through the servers, otherwise heat exchangers would’ve been mentioned.
What “other fluids besides water” would they be using?
Problem is when the electricity generation and water supplies are sized for the existing usage pattern, then a new user comes in demanding a huge amount more, and the existing users of the electricity and water are expected to pay for the expansion. It doesn’t really matter if the user is a data center, foundry, or whatever, but new foundries aren’t being built, and new datacenters are.
In other cases the datacenters are bad neighbors, because they’re running their own power generation, which is loud and pollutes. They also delay the shutting down of the dirtiest power generation, which is bad for everyone.
Sure, they may pay some property tax, if they didn’t negotiate that away before being built, but what other tax do they generate for the local community? It’s not a mall, so no big sales tax increase. Not many employees, so not feeding the local economy that way.
Even when they do pay the going rate for utilities, they will cause price increases, because they have driven up the demand. So the local community is not enriched, and everyone’s electricity and water bills go up. NIMBY does not seem like an overreaction or naive stand.
I would genuinely support a data center in my neighborhood that was closed loop cooling, and powered 90+% by solar (onsite and offsite), battery (onsite), and wind (offsite).
Ah, I feel so much better given your cite-free statement. My cite showed it has more than doubled in the last 5 years and is expected to more than double again in the next five. That’s exponential.
Data center electricity and water usage has nothing to do with Peak Oil.
A factory employs thousands of workers. A typical data center might employ 30-100, and the massive hyperscale centers maybe 200-300. It has nothing to do with how “legible” the data center is.
Peak oil was never “OMG we’re going to run out of oil in 12 months” it’s that oil is going to stop being cheap. However, our (USA and similar) economies and supply chains depend on it being cheap. So even though other more expensive sources have been developed, they don’t satiate the demand, so we turn to stupid shit like kidnapping heads of state and going to war to try to secure cheaper oil (and feed the military industrial complex and all that nonsense too). And like I said before, just because it didn’t peak when expected, that doesn’t mean it’s “debunked.” We know oil is finite, so eventually it’s not going to be worth extracting it to burn anymore.
I don’t think you and I are that far apart. We both agree that data centers are needed and will continue to require more resources.
But unless we are mad about datacenters, none of the things you say are necessary will ever happen. They need to pay their fair share, they need to consider the ecological impact. Currently, neither of those are happening. It is completely justified to be mad about them.
Wait, debunked? When did we discover that the amount of oil on the Earth is infinite?
Same for me. If their infrastructure doesn’t pollute and doesn’t use community resources (water or electricity), then fine with me.
Typically a solution, so water is involved, but mixed with a coolant. Looks like propylene and ethylene clycol are common ones on Amazon for home kits. It’s partly because plain water can itself damage equipment.
For immersion cooling, I’ve seen an oil similar to mineral oil used at a company I used to work at. Safer than water where electricity is involved. Small impeller at the bottom of each tank so any heat could spread about the tub. I don’t remember what was in the coolant loop but they fed it out to the cooling towers outside, which is where they did the main heat exchange
The glycol solutions are antifreeze chemicals, but I haven’t heard of them being used much in computer cooling because sub-ambient liquid cooling is plagued with condensation issues. Are there antimicrobial properties to those? Because that definitely matters in closed-loop cooling systems.
I don’t think anyone serious is doing immersion cooling at scale, it’s just too difficult to swap out components, and it’s super messy. Generally, like I said before, the servers are mostly air cooled, but they have water blocks attached to the CPU and GPU to liquid cool those components directly, since those are the biggest loads.
Maybe not the big companies, but ours (not a tech company but one that still had significant computing needs) at the time had several hundred racks each in its own tank here in the US and 3 other similar centers elsewhere. Major pain in the butt for the HPC guys. I heard they expanded that even more, but I don’t know by how much. And somehow convinced people it was ‘green’ because they were using less power than conventional cooling.
One of our competitors had a similar setup, though with a different style cooling loop. Also a few hundred tanks in the US.
So, not ‘major’ scale but pretty big compared to a mom and pop outfit.
Of course that didn’t happen, because that’s not what the “peak oil” argument was. The argument in the early 2000’s went something like, there will be an irreversible crunch in the oil supply fairly soon (15 or so years), so drastic changes were needed. Obviously the oil supply didn’t crunch in 2015, we have more than ever. Oil isn’t infinite, but there’s effectively enough that the physical supply is never going to cause the economic crunch.
Activists who were really more concerned about the climate, war, and oil oligarchs latched onto peak oil to make their case to convert to a post-petroleum economy. But the crunch never happened, partially because the math and assumptions of the theory were flawed, and partially because new technologies improved the extractive capacity.
We should get off oil for many reasons, but not because the rug is going to be pulled out from under us because of supply. That theory is dead.
The same dynamics are playing out with AI. People have correctly gauged that the general public isn’t well equipped to talk about the nuances of negative AI externalities, so they’ve pivoted to scaremongering about power and water. These factors will eventually adjust to meet demand, they will lose their salience, and the underlying negative externalities of AI will go unaddressed as a consequence.
The conspiracy-minded could be forgiven for believing that Big Tech is actually seeding the public narrative with a fixable problem (power and water) to direct attention away from the problems that aren’t so easy to solve. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but certainly the narrative does have that effect, intended or not.
That’s not “peak oil”. Peak oil is just the observation that oil production (or equivalently consumption) can’t keep increasing forever, so eventually, there must come a time when it reaches a peak. That’s all it says. Once you’ve established that completely obvious and undeniable fact, then you can try to figure out when that will happen and how, and those estimates of when and how might turn out to be wrong, but there will still be a time of peak oil, just at a different time.