Comment by cleverpotato479
8 hours ago
A lot of confusion around AI water usage might stem from whether it's an open-loop or a closed-loop cooling system.
e.g. an open-loop system which disposes of waste heat through evaporation is naturally going to draw a lot more water than a closed-loop system which recycles the water. Open-loop is likely cheaper to build, and importantly, it _does_ use up a lot of water that could otherwise be going to a municipality.
So, what's the actual breakdown between these two? I absolutely _could_ imagine many datacenter operators cheaping out and using open loop cooling, particularly if building next to a source of fresh water like a river.
A lot o the confusion around data centers is that these companies purposely hide this information from the public. We already know how damaging normal data centers are:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/the-dalles...
Citizens had to sue their town to force them to give up water usage, something Google was adamant about hiding from the public.
When there is no accountability, trust plummets. There is no reason to trust anything from these corpos or their pro-corpo rags.
A lot of us work for and do business with companies that purposefully hide information from the public.
That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.
Oh yeah it's totally normal for neoliberal America to fuck over the public at every opportunity for private corporate gain. Not going to disagree with that at all.
But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.
3 replies →
To simplify things, "closed loop" shouldn't even be part of the discussion. Usually they just mean a closed-loop cooling system somewhere inside, either to directly cool machines (typically ML) or to cool air for air-cooled machines (standard). That's separate from how you eject the heat from the coolant to the environment. That's either cooling towers (like swamp cooler, uses water), chillers (like A/C, no water but more power), or passive air cooling (like car radiator, no water but only practical if very cold outside).
So you could have a closed-loop water system cooling your machines or chips, but still be consuming water to cool the coolant. And they will advertise this as "closed loop." Better to ask if they have a cooling tower.
Open loop cooling can work fine if they use greywater. The water isn’t potable anymore, but it goes into the sky and becomes clean again.
It’s all just a lack of imagination.
Only (mostly) water evaporate, salt and most contamination don't, so you get a brine that you must manage because otherwise it clog your heat exchangers and evaporation towers. Also, it must be returner to a river carefully to not kill all fish and life forms there.
Most of the confusion just stems from anti-DC advocates lying about water usage, not any specific technical details.