[Harmless Teddy Bear]

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.

Except they contradict that in the next sentence.

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.

If you have a closed loop no refill would be necessary.

So the loop is only sort of closed but not really.

Now, the big question, where does your lost water with all the additives go?

Because if it is going up into the atmosphere there might be another tiny problem.

[chajin]

If you have a closed loop no refill would be necessary.

Nothing is perfectly closed. Back when dtr worked in a computer shop, she would get big desktops with closed loop water cooling, it would run out after about three years, so the smart thing was to bring it to the shop annually and let them break the seal, flush and refill the water, and then reseal.

Now, coincidentally enough, dtr now is employed by a company that installs networking at data center sites, so she works alongside IREN people and sees the similarity to the water cooling computers, only on a more massive scale.

[algore]

Tiny amounts of fluid can escape over time through pipe joints, valve seals, and pump packing glands.

When opening the pipes to repair or replace servers, chillers, or internal components requires draining parts of the system.

sometimes you drain from the bottom of the cooler a small ammount of the circulating liquid to remove built-up minerals, impurities, or treatment chemicals that concentrate during recycling, but the total losses per year are in the hundreds of gallons not thousands.

it is not a big deal.

Msft has several datacenters that use ambient air 99% of the time, they only have to use their chiller 3-5 days per year, I have taken tours.

[marktwain]

There is always some loss from refreshing coolant and doing maintenance. The same happens in cars. You do not keep the water in the radiator for the life of the car.

[chaosagent]

If you have a closed loop no refill would be necessary.

Your car's radiator is a closed loop, but you still need to add coolant to it occasionally.

So the loop is only sort of closed but not really.

Now, the big question, where does your lost water with all the additives go?

Where does the lost coolant from your car radiator with all the additives go?