Comment by thereisnospork
2 days ago
Data center water consumption isn't due to it's use as a heat transfer medium, it's due to the evaporative cooling which cashes in water's enthalpy of vaporization.
Thr alternative would be to use a heat pump and spend electricity to cool the water that cools the servers.
Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option.
OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :(
[1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic...
[2]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/DLC-Rack