this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don't do anything
Yes because washing cars is much less important than growing food
Juts search for "AI water consumption" or "data center water consumption". I'll agree that "we could be using this to wash our cars" is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
If you live in a low humidity area you can cool with an evaporative cooler cheaper than with air con. Evaporative coolers consume quite a bit of water
Some facilities is do this. They're not 100% efficient, so some is lost to evaporation, some must be dumped because it has too much mineral content (and too much conductivity) to go back through the cooling system. Reusing is only about 50% efficient (according to Google's numbers).
On a standard PC, you can easily have a loop because the radiator is big enough to exhause all that heat. But when your computer or cluster puts out multiple thousands of watts of heat, eventually you need to get rid of tge hot water and replace it with cold water. And when it gets even hotter, you need a steady stream of cold water that immediately gets dumped.
Half a liter per kilowatt hour. That's the average water use
It's like the idea of recycling plastics with water.
Not all of it is reusable to the same degree. A good portion of water has to be evaporated off to cool down the exterior towers plus water isn't really infinitely usable in these loops. It gets gross or full of materials.
Another thing that people need to remember is generating electricity uses the water here as we literally don't use many methods that don't involve water, we are not on a green grid and neither are these huge data centers for the most part. We boil it for the electricity then have to use additional to clean the system after.