Posted on 07/24/2026 8:17:43 AM PDT by econjack
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to data centers seems to be water use. I just saw this:
"One of the most common questions we get about AI data centers is how much water do they use? Fair question. Older designs cooled servers by evaporating water and people naturally assume ours do too. They don't.
IREN's sites are different. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling in a closed loop. Same idea as a car radiator or a fridge. Fill it once and the water just goes round and round.
Over the life of a 200MW site, the initial fill plus every top-up averages out to about as much water each year as 3 households.
Not a town. Not a suburb. Not a street... 3 houses.
Water matters in the regions we build in. Which is precisely why our cooling barely uses any."
It's an Australian company, and I haven't found much info on it.
The leftist luddites are so stupid and paranoid that they feel threatened by AI. They think they will be replaced permantly by machines with stored information and logic circuits. Clearly these are things they lack.
Independent investigators have been doing some great work showing how much these data centers pollute. These data centers are easily a net negative on society.
I know it is a cost issue, but they should be exploring fluids that absorb heat and never evaporate. The cost is high one, but maintenance would be minimal.
“... but they should be exploring fluids that absorb heat and never evaporate”
~~~
Water loss through evaporation or any other way is not really the problem.
Heat must be transferred. Entropy is rarely ever fast enough unless your heat loads are relatively low. So even if you have a closed loop of fluids, you have to cast that heat off somewhere. If you have a water to water transfer, then you use a heat exchanger submersed under water or using a water loop to exchange it too, such as a geothermal loop, or evaporation pond, cooling towers, etc.
The movement of heat out of your heat producing system is what requires the energy. If you have an old fashioned water to air system, then you have blower fans at the very least, although more than likely you will also have mechanical cooling (compressed and evaporated refrigerants).
(didn’t finish my thought) ...and if you have a water to water system, then you expend energy on the pumps that move the heated water to the heat exchangers and back again.
As someone said earlier in this thread. There is no free lunch. Heat doesn’t dissipate into the environment on it’s own fast enough. You need to consume energy to expedite the process one way or another.
I don’t think it is. If it’s closed loop, it appears to take the annual water use of 3 average homes to fill it, or about 438,000 gallons for 3 homes of 4 people. If that has to be repeated each year, there must be some form of loss in the process of using it for a year. However, that is still far below the billions of gallons some suggest.
I am unaware of any real (i.e., unbiased) research on this. Would you provide a URL for the studies?
I think 3M already has such a fluid. I remember reading about it years ago. It was used to cool electronic circuits because is was non-conductive so it could be flowed right over the printed circuit boards directly. (If I recall correctly, another interesting property was demonstrated by taking a rabbit and immersing in it and it could still breath while being submerged.) I think it was used to cool Seymour Cray’s original Cray 1 supercomputer.
The first is the power consumption. People do not like the idea of their power bills going up.
Solution, for every data center you must build a power plant that will produce twice as much power as currently required. This will bring power bills down. This will solve about 45% of people's objections.
Next is water usage. The closed system idea is quite a good one. One that contains no added chemicals would be even better. If the waste water coming out of the system is drinkable or if the system is actually a sealed system you have solved 30% of people's objections.
The third is location, location, location.
Do not put your Data Center with say 500 jobs in an area that only has 2000 people. The place does not have the infrastructure to support your grand scheme. And mostly, they don't want you there. They have a nice quiet place where they grow their apples, know all their neighbors, sit out at night enjoying the quiet and pay low property taxes. They are not millionaires. They don't want to be. And there is nothing wrong with that.
So put your data center in an area that already has most of the infrastructure in place. That will take care of another 20% of people's objections.
These are not people being "leftist luddites". These are reasonable concerns and objections that people have.
You can either address them or you can just call them names.
One way works, the other not so much.
But you do you.
I am aware of the hydrology cycle and the water doesn’t really disappear. That, for me, isn’t the issue.
It’s that we need to clean that water after it leaves. It is my understanding that the water that leaves is fairly contaminated.
Can they build them next to the oceans and use that water for cooling?
There are many alternatives to large data centers being pursued...includi. in ocean, in sky, distributed, for homes, etc.
Sorry. But it is critically important to recognize and understand the pathological mindset of people who lead the opposition to AI and almost all capitalistic innovations and advances. The Left has opposed nuclear energy, oil exploration, pipelines, innovations in farming techniques, irrigation projects, roads and most industrial development. They abhor profit and individual standout achievments especially if they enrich that individual. There is a pathology present that tries to make people miserable. Know your enemies to defeat them.
From what I can tell, they have been built in the interior of Australia, which is very sparsely populated. Whether that choice was because that land is relatively cheap or because no one is there to protest, I don’t know. Most people in Australia live near the coast, so access to ocean water is expensive.
As I have said, Wally, when you peak beneath the covers, you find a lot of foreign investment in protest groups against utilities that are competitive with the Chinese and Russians, as well as our political and long time enemies like Iran, North Korea, and the whole Global System that is arrayed against the US Production. I wish someone had the balls to follow the money.
there’s no magic to IREN: they’re simply using massive refrigeration units to chill the closed-loop circulating cooling water, which requires ~10 times the amount of electrical energy compared to an evaporative cooling unit with the same cooling capacity ...
data centers stuffed with tons of ICs are basically nothing more than gimungus toasters from an energy perspective: every megawatt/hour consumed to operate the ICs is converted into a megawatt/hour of waste heat ...
those megawatt/hours of waste heat can be removed either by evaporative cooling or by conventional refrigeration that consumes ten times the energy that evaporative cooling uses, plus conventional refrigeration itself generates 20-30% additional waste heat for every BTU of cooling power produced ... as a consequence, evaporative cooling is the greenest of green methods for cooling ...
two things: 1) I wonder if there is some way to use that excess heat in a useful way (e.g., heating buildings, desalinization, etc.), and 2) I’m not sure being “green” is a key objective, unless that includes minimizing the use of ground water.
Well, duh.
I was involved with design of large computer rooms up to small data centers going back to the mid-80s thru the late 90s. Yes, some sort of refrigeration is needed, and yes, the heat rejection system can be water cooled (a cooling tower or evap condenser) or it can be air cooled (typically less efficient, works much like your typical home system).
The amount of water for water cooled systems is really nothing unless you’re trying to do this out west, perhaps. It seems to me the people freaking out over water usage A) don’t know what they’re talking about and/or B) have bought into what is likely a CCP lie, just like the many psyops we were fed by commies during the Cold War.
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