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I don't get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it's for cooling, but that doesn't destroy the water..
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you're cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I've seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
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Could someone explain to me how these data centers use up water? Like is it evaporating? What happens to the water? I get the water consumption is very high but is the problem we're removing it from places that don't refill or does into the environment mean it's wastewater? Please someone help me understand.
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No wonder the government don't want anymore report on climate change.
If you live in Texas, leave.
I wish... We get over a thousand new residents a day. It's awful.
So assuming the datacenter uses the water for cooling, what happens to the water? Does it just get released as steam?
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Stinky teens need shirts that point the blame at Microsoft. Get ripe and hang out with old people.
Can't they just use seawater or use air cooling?
A lot of the need is due to the heat density of the GPUs used for GenAI. Could they build less densely? Yes, and they likely already are but need to go further. I have seen data centers with racks less than half (I think it was closer to one quarter) populated for energy density issues.
Could they use sea water? Sea water causes more corrosion. (I am uncertain if this data center is close to the ocean.)
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Yes that's what Americans voted for.