In the future, I may be unable to shower and the nation's crops may be dying of drought but thank god we will be able to use our Yankee chatbots as the good lord intended
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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But it’s not like all the water just disappears after it enters the data centres. Surely what happens to it when it leaves is key. Can’t it be treated and returned?
But it’s not like all the water just disappears after it enters the data centres.
It doesn't disappear as such, but it won't be in usable form.
The reason they want to make use of the water isn't as a heat transfer fluid to something else (well, they might use some water for that too, but that's not what's driving the consumption). They're evaporating it. The phase change from liquid water to water vapor consumes energy.
Evaporative coolers work on this principle.
So now you've got a bunch of water vapor blowing away in the wind, which you're not going to be drinking. It's not gone, as it'll turn into rain or some other form of precipitation somewhere else, but that'll be somewhere else.
Same thing some thermal power plants do
you probably have seen images of those nuclear power plants with cooling towers, and other types of thermal power plants will do the same, coal, oil, gas.
That being said, they don't really need freshwater, as long as they can set up some sort of evaporation system that uses seawater for cooling, doesn't clog up from salt or other stuff building up. More of a hassle to deal with than freshwater, but it still evaporates. The UK being an archipelago, seawater is not in terribly short supply.
Thanks for the explanation.
So this is effectively like half of a fridges coolant system, but they’re missing the bit where they condense the coolant back and reuse it?
I don't know if the coolant in fridges undergoes phase change between gas or liquid or just pressure change and stays a gas, but if it does a phase change, sure.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
A gaseous refrigerant is compressed so its pressure and temperature rise. When operating as a heater in cold weather, the warmed gas flows to a heat exchanger in the indoor space where some of its thermal energy is transferred to that indoor space, causing the gas to condense into a liquid. The liquified refrigerant flows to a heat exchanger in the outdoor space where the pressure falls, the liquid evaporates and the temperature of the gas falls.
Yeah, sounds like it does do a phase change.
They can't even treat water with literal shit in it before dumping it back into rivers and the sea. Why would they be able to do any better with data centres.
Well it doesn’t have literal shit in it for starters.
If you have a water cooled pc, one end of it isn’t connected to the mains and the other end to the drain. It’s a loop. I can’t see why the same can’t be made true of data centres.
Money is why, you expect amazon to pay extra money to setup a closed loop system when they could offset the costs to the water company?
I don’t expect them too, I expect them to be made too. No data centres should be allowed to treat water as an infinite resource.
I see you're labouring under the illusion that the UK government aren't desperate for AI cash
What’s fucking ridiculous, is that any industry could not have to report water usages. Let alone an environmental disaster area like AI.