this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Data center water cooling isn't a closed loop. They generally don't use it like PC water cooling. There are exceptions, but servers are typically air cooled.
What they did is look for a less energy intensive way to cool the air than traditional air conditioning. So they turned to evaporative cooling, and also misting the incoming air. This reduced their energy use, but at the expense of water use.
It shows up in the inflow and outflow of water:
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/sip-or-guzzle-heres-how-googles-data-centers-use-water
They're evaporating away a lot more water than they return.
Ok, but the point is once water evaporates it doesn't stay evaporated forever. It condenses and turns into rain or snow.
Where exactly do people think this water is going when it evaporates? Space?
I think it goes out of the cycle somewhat, kinda like all that is held up
If 100L rain down a day, and you use 10L for cooling then you will have still have 100L flowing but now only 90L for actual use. And then datacenters take up a significant amount of the total then you have a lot less to use elsewhere such as watering fields for example.
Where I live we have this huge river around our city that provides most of the province with freshwater (along with all of the rivers that feed into it, but the population concentrates around that one big river)
That one big river is also a place for ships to go through, and an ecosystem (despite all of the disruption).
More water in use by all kinds of facilities still manages to lower the level of the river significantly, to the point where there have been worries raised about the ecosystem and where shipping capacity was reduced.