I work at a datacenter that uses around 2 bathtubs of water per month - almost none in the winter and weather dependent in summer. In my opinion not much. The closed loop sends water from the computers up to the roof where it trickles down a series of radiators to cool then flows back inside. Some is lost due to evaporation but it is very efficient. For most of the year we are just blasting in air from outside but the water chillers kick in when the outside temp reaches 23C.
Though sadly they are not building datacenters like this anymore because it’s more reliable and cheaper to just use water and discard it. I believe we went this way because power is all hydro here and very cheap.
The electricity generation uses much, much more (on average)
Is the DC you work more for storage or is it high compute like DCs for LLMs? I’m just curious how the size and heat generation would compare if it’s not.
It’s a datacenter used primarily for research computing and education. Internet Archives even pays rent on a rack hosted here.
It used to be the latter but it’s becoming the former. We recently had to add many new chillers as we deploy high compute nodes.
Very large increase in power demand but in my location the power grid is way bigger than the load and we sell power to the states that we don’t use anyway.
Many new nodes are coming online due to the square kilometer array project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array
We had to take out some trees and build a tall wall so the neighbours can’t hear it which kind of sucks. Nobody has complained but we preemptively built the wall due to bad press over noise complaints circulating the media right now I think.
I have to say the environment inside the data room has become a lot more hostile to work in since we turned on so many high compute nodes. It’s very loud and one of the hot aisles is around 42C. I can only imagine the traces of metal bearings I have in my lungs.
Basically though I think it’s impossible to deploy a hyper datacenter with the same cooling system we use in 2026. At such mass scale there is no way you could source enough chillers in such short amount of time. After covid it’s been hard to get things like this. It’s very specialized equipment.
So that’s why they are trying to deploy them in the middle of nowhere where you can just steal the water and therefor the cooling system is very simple.
And if we want to get into conspiracies I think this is the real reason that the US administration is so interested in Greenland and Canada. China is close to deploying a quantum computer and whoever does that first will be the new world power without any doubt.
Yeah you’re in what I’d refer to as a “traditional” DC. Power per rack in those facilities are about 16kW give or take. Hyperscale AI DCs use about 80-100kW per rack. It’s astonishing that it’s an almost 8x increase in power (and thus water) and they’re cheaping out and not wanting to build closed loop, so you can only imagine what that hot aisle is like.
Thanks for the response. That’s all pretty interesting.
Lying pedophiles today are allowed to be state secretaries and run their mouths without consequences. What a time we live in…
You don’t think the traitorous mother fucker would lie do you?
Ah, so municipalities should ration water to data centers just enough to cover sanitation and drinking needs, got it.
The data centers will be towed beyond the environment.
Oh he’s definitely not saying that because he found a anonymous envelope full of money.
I’ve heard Silicon Valley psychos referring to it as “The Water Hoax”
Why can’t they use grain alcohol? Or maybe a glycol product? I feel like alcohol is cheaper and more accessible locally to US. Thinner and lighter would help with thermodynamics with heat transfer and cooling back down, no?
They are using evaporative towers because they are the cheapest cooling solution, that’s why they waste water. If they wanted to implement something better, they could easily do it with all the billions in investment they are getting.
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My understanding is that all of the AI slop factories are liquid cooled, and that’s where a lot of the major new investment is going. They are mainly using evaporative cooling, because it is cheaper. But, we could require them to spend the extra money (and power) to use closed-loop cooling, and then they would not use up nearly as much water.
It’s a solvable problem. All we need to do is force them to do it.
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All the new nVidia stuff is liquid cooled, full stop
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidias-ai-chips-making-liquid-213103744.html
NVidia understands this too, and are trying to convince all their customers to go closed-loop. We’ll see if they pony up.
https://marketwise.com/investing/nvidia-liquid-cooling-tech-ai-data-centers-energy/
The blog that references: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/liquid-cooling-ai-factories/
I am not anti-datacenter. Your phone apps need a back-end somewhere. But these datacenter companies are making gazillions of dollars. If they want to exist, we should force them to pay whatever it takes to have as little effect on the environment as possible, even if it means their profits are a few million off this month. They can afford it.
Why are you switching between liters and gallons in your example? And why are you looking at national water usage when the problems are accute to local townships?
The Prineville campus in Oregon uses 200M gallons annually. That’s not a small fraction of the Prineville area.
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