Data centre water usage - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 09:48:37 am
content: Along with the power requirements news stories and hang wringers are constantly shouting about water usage for these plants.It makes me frown and wonder, "In what ways does a data centre 'use' or 'consume' water?"Well obviously cooling. That's either going to be closed or open system. Either feed water is brought in cold and immediately expelled 1*C or so higher or a fixed volume is captured and circulated through load and cooling towers.Neither "consume" or "use up" any sizeable amount of water. Certainly not if you compare it to a power plant or other industries.A lot of industry bring in feed water and produce "waste" water that cannot be reused without treatment. Unless data centres are using "open systems" with additives I don't see how the water coming out of them can't be drunk by kittens.What am I missing?

author: kite31
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 10:00:20 am
content: Evaporation in cooling towers.I have read one claim that a large data centre can consume around 20 megalitres a day, an AI centre more. I do not know actual figures or what constitutes "large".An open system may have downstream environmental effects from the temperature increase.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 10:01:47 am
content: Apparently open loop evaporative cooling is very common with larger datacentres. I didn't know that before I looked into it after seeing similar reports. These obviously dump the water back into reservoirs/sewer systems. The water isn't used up per-se but it needs to go through the water cycle before it becomes drinkable again, unless it is processed directly into potable water (very rare). This means areas that have a shortage of water - prone to drought - should be particularly opposed to open-loop cooling. The water that is discharged by an open loop system isn't safe to dump directly into the environment because it tends to be warm, and it will also be contaminated by corrosion and microplastic waste, but companies have gotten away with it for a while with an out-of-sight out-of-mind attitude.I think as factors go though, it's a pretty minor set of them though; the electricity usage is far more concerning, with some datacentres operating at tens of megawatts of demand 24/7.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 10:58:19 am
content: I recently read this story about the queue of data center proposals and their demand for water.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-15/greater-western-water-data-centre-proposals-foi/105529020This paragraph interested me. It is a comment from NextDC a company that develops and manages data centers in Australia. It seemed a typical corporate response designed to say nothing of substance."A spokesperson for NextDC, which has multiple data centres in Melbourne, said the company had incorporated storm-water retention basins, vegetated swales, buffer strips and rain gardens in some of its sites, and the Fisherman's Bend facility would comply with all water licensing requirements."None of that seems to address the cooling water and instead addresses the need to manage rainwater runoff and look "green and trendy" to by-passers.Having gone through a significant drought around the early part of this century the main dam that supplies Melbourne dropped to a little over 16% on June 17 2009. And the overall system dropped as low as 28.7%.The government rushed through the construction of a desalination plant. Which has not been needed since it was completed in Dec 2012. There was concern a city of over 3 million people would run short of water. That was around 2009, now in 2025 Melbourne has 2M more people to draw upon the same water supplies so they are effectively nearly halving the water storage capacity on a per capita basis. So in the next drought, and there will be one, the water level will decline faster with greater demand on them.There were concerns around a big coal power plant that the river feeding it cooling water may decline to a level where the power generation would need to be limited.In a country like Australia with populations concentrated in a few large capital cities they can't build new dams easily since the best places are already taken.Water is the critical resource in a place like Australia and we should not use it unwisely. Australia needs to embrace renewables that don't require vast amounts of cooling water. The only water I would be OK with data-centers using would be pumped storage for power generation.https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/206168/melbourne/population

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 12:06:56 pm
content: Quote from: wilfred on August 15, 2025, 10:58:19 amAre they allocating water with economics, or is it the usual politicians picking winners and losers?QuoteI thought California did the same thing, but now I cannot find any reference to it.

author: kjpye
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 12:11:08 pm
content: Quote from: wilfred on August 15, 2025, 10:58:19 amThe desalination plant has been used quite regularly in recent years. This year the Victorian government has ordered 50Glitres of water from it, about a third of its capacity.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 01:31:47 pm
content: Or simply mandate that if you want to build a datacentre you have to used closed loop cooling systems with refrigeration to cool the coolant. I suspect it'll cost more to build and install, but droughts are no joke, and the last thing water starved areas need is more water demand.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 01:54:44 pm
content: The energy usage to do mostly unnecessary and inefficient stuff (like LLMs) at datacenters is becoming a very real and serious problem. Water use is just the tip of the iceberg, correlating with the actual problem which is energy.Without this completely ridiculous wasting of resources we could soon have nice things, like independence from CO2-heavy and politically unstable fossil fuels because the generation side (cleantech) has done some seriously good job and even the storage side / flexible use of things advances.But people generating 1000 words of total bullshit they can then submit as their own work cannot even be scheduled for low-demand periods (like water heating or EV charging can).Everyone was so worried about bitcoin and CO2 but now suddenly it's entirely OK to waste gigawatts of power to do 0.0001% useful work, and ruin all of the energy efficiency advancements of computer hardware and algorithm work seen over the last 70 years or so.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 02:28:11 pm
content: How do you determine what is unnecessary and inefficient?If they have a choice between evaporative cooling, and air cooling via pumping heat with electric power, they will make a decision based on the economics of which costs the least.They applied their computing power to LLMs based again on the economics of opportunity cost. That *was* the most efficient use for their investment.Do you have a better way of making these decisions than economics?If they are wasting water in an area where water is a precious resource, then the water is priced too low, which is no surprise when it is controlled by political interests which subsidize it. Pick one: price controls and shortages, or free market economics.The very real and serious problem is politicians ignoring economics, as if it does not apply to them and their constituents.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 02:35:15 pm
content: Currently the TCO of evaporative cooling is less than of traditional AC if evaporative cooling is feasible (low humidity). When water becomes more expensive the TCO calculation will shift towards traditional AC. The same when electric power becomes cheaper (unlikely to happen anytime soon). However, that calculation has to be done for each data center individually.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 03:49:26 pm
content: As with a lot of industries. If you left them without any rules or regulations. Soon, (hypothetical example), the local rivers would start turning bright green, and every other local human birth, would have 12 toes.So, it just needs local/non-local regulations to keep the companies in check. As there are (I suspect), many different ways of keeping data-centres cool. It's just that some of them would cost the data-centre(s) more money/hassle, lower server density, etc. Possibly slightly lower performance, and so on.My understanding is the advantage/pull with using evaporative cooling, is it minimizes extra (expensive) energy costs, for keeping the data-centre plant cool. Such as HVAC, which tends to be used in modest sized server rooms, especially very densely packed ones. Which would try to reach crazy high temperatures (usually I think, the servers would automatically slow down or even shut-down, automatically, if the ambient temperature is too high), otherwise, with so many server racks, packed with so many servers, in a relatively small area.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 05:49:35 pm
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 15, 2025, 10:01:47 amThat's the bit that concerns me. All of that heat that's being generated has got to be dissipated in some way and that's almost certainly means the use of massive amounts of water. And probably the use of evaporative cooling so that means that the water will not be recovered. That's nice for the environmentalists since there is no polluted water to deal with. But it also means that the areas near the data centers will face the loss of massive amounts of available water and will face huge increases in the humidity levels which will in turn increase the demand for air conditioning and in turn, even more electrical demand. It seems like this could easily snow ball out of control.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 06:03:06 pm
content: I think this water thing should act as a huge red flag which indicates excessive energy use. IMO it makes no sense trying to micro-optimize between different cooling solutions, that ends up being replacing one problem (e.g. local drought) with others (e.g. even more energy use).The root issue we should be solving instead is excessive energy use of these new "data paradigms". We are fundamentally still doing just the same we did 10 years ago: messaging each other and watching videos where cats drop objects, and failing to do our jobs. Computer hardware has got more and more efficient all the time yet now somehow in last few years we are suddenly spending more, and what's worst,planning to spend even more, a lot more, and no one can explain how e.g. this AI thing really does anything useful. All objective studies seem to point that the effect is purely detrimental on productivity.So now the idea is that it's somehow ideal that each human being should be burning possibly hundreds of Watts on average all the time so that they can not do their job, and let AI fail on their behalf, while chatting with the most expensive chatbots in human history. And that's cool, we should just accept that, and instead maybe stop using dairy products completely even when studies say they have no significant negative impact to anything at all? And to support this AI paradigm shift we of course need as much fossil fuels as possible. Forget all the advances we have made during last 20 years or so, and give people their chatbots.We have EV tax in Finland. Why can't we have AI tax? I'm asking seriously.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 06:18:56 pm
content: Quote from: MK14 on August 15, 2025, 03:49:26 pmThat is a different discussion about how to handle negative externalities. The politicians who meddle in the free market with subsidies are the same politicians who allow companies to get away with pollution by either not allowing the free market to account for negative externalities, or not allowing the legal system to account for pollution through torts. Either could be used, and there is your third option which repeatedly fails, but for a given situation one will be more efficient than the other.QuoteI just gave two examples which do not require regulations to keep companies in check, so there is no just anything.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 06:20:14 pm
content: I'm not sure I agree that AI is counterproductive, at least not when applied appropriately. There are certainly many counterproductive uses of it, but I find it has replaced a lot of my former use of Google and Stack Overflow as a developer. Vibe coding is bullshit, but it will probably die just as other "zero-code" fads have come and gone, because the problem with programming has never been learning the language, but learning to think logically and break problems down; if the operator can't do this, then they can't hope to replace this with an LLM either, because LLM's (despite what AI companies want us to believe) can't actually reason like humans do.It's certainly true that there seems to be an enormous amount of money pouring into AI right now and I question where the revenue really is. A $20/month customer for OpenAI loses the company money on average. People don't generally like to pay much for online services, most people grumble at $15/month for Netflix or $10/month for Spotify. Sure, a developer might be able to justify a bit more money for their employer to spend on them if it has a genuinely high boost to productivity (I would say it makes me maybe 5-10% more productive, it's not huge, but it's not zero). But that's still not going to be a huge revenue source. And it seems companies are desperate to include AI even in places where it doesn't make any sense. The other day I saw Samsung now has a TV with an AI chatbot integrated. Seriously, who gives a damn about that?Add in the training data... basically, anything post 2022 is poisoned, so it becomes increasingly difficult to train these AIs on anything recent. It requires a lot more human curation. And these AI models keep growing to enormous sizes but don't seem to get that much smarter.I could see a big "dot-com style crash" coming from this. We'll be left with a few survivors who will straggle on and something hopefully a little more sensible.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 06:51:45 pm
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 15, 2025, 06:20:14 pmIt's not going to be applied "appropriately" on average, which is all that matters. Even if you are able to use it in the most productive way, it still uses a lot of energy, even for you. And for each tom66, there are at least 10 others who use it to produce counterproductive bullcrap and waste 100% of the energy. That's the issue.Of course there are a lot of human bullshitters that are detrimental to the society and produce CO2 by breathing, but I'm not going to suggest killing them, not even for trolling purposes. But AI is something wecanunplug. We don't needmorebullshit to the world already filled to the brim with bullshit, and spend even more energy in the process.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 07:03:30 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on August 15, 2025, 06:18:56 pmThe US may well handle things differently, to the UK (often the EU tends to be similar). But a water shortage situation (official drought), in the UK. Usually means specific laws (if I understand things correctly), come into play. Which allow the local water companies to impose fines (as in against the law to do these things), on things such as using hosepipes (at peoples homes, e.g. for washing cars, or watering the garden), and other (non-essential use of water) stuff.So, I would assume, the same laws (would be changed if necessary), to limit/prohibit, data centres from using too much (or maybe even any) non-essential water.Quote from: David Hess on August 15, 2025, 06:18:56 pmTechnically speaking, I agree with you.But in practice, in the UK (and typically in the EU), as I understand it. They tend to fix various things and make them the wayTHEYwant. By bringing in new laws and/or amending/using existing ones.E.g. Forcing everyone to use LED lighting, for just about everything. Even when it doesn't make that much sense. E.g. Inside oven lamps, where LEDs tend to not get on well in such a hot environment.Another arguably good example, is modern cars. Where even the humble petrol engine, is having to go. Along, with so many millions, of new regulations, potentially making cars too expensive when new, unreliable (too many systems), not last very long (too much add on nonsense), annoying to drive, e.g. beeping all the time, forcing you to keep to all speed limits at all times.Way too complicated, crazily expensive when repairs/servicing/accident-damage needs to be fixed.So you end up having to get an electric car (sooner or later), which for very long journeys, can't 'fill up', in a matter of minutes, any more.I even keep on hearing that modern cars, 'leak' your location information (and other stuff, to the car makers, without your permission, in real terms, maybe technically agreed, if you read the (hypothetical example) 2,000 page terms and conditions box you had to tick, when buying the car), and maybe even conversations inside the vehicle (probably just specific Chinese car makers), to other parties.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 07:08:01 pm
content: Be careful where you get your cooling water from, lest nature rises up and bites you. Jellyfish(!) on this occasion but an algal bloom in a fresh water storage pond would probably make a mess of your filters too...https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx299eyg7qko

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2025, 09:06:17 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on August 15, 2025, 06:51:45 pmRight - but there are lots of counterproductive uses of all forms of technology. We don't get rid of technology that has some counterproductive uses, just because there are some that use the technology badly. What I will say is that the likelihood that AI remains free, like some kind of ad-supported tier, seems very low. The "good" AI models require a ton of computing power, and those needs will only increase. That might just help tame down some of the bullshit use cases.Anyway, the cat is out of the bag when it comes to LLMs, given you can run something like GPT-oss-20b on a consumer graphics card (that costs less than $1,000 and is roughly as performant as GPT o3-mini), or even something like Llama 3-8B on a Raspberry Pi 5... so like it or not (and I'm sure you don't), this bullshit is here to stay.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 05:19:54 am
content: Quote from: MK14 on August 15, 2025, 07:03:30 pmThe US does it the same way, with historic water rights adding more complexity.QuoteThe US has all of the same things going on. Politicians and governments will do their thing. At the end of every law, are men with guns prepared to use violence.QuoteAll of that happens in the US. I remember one of the first court cases where OnStar was used to wiretap the vehicle, but it is routine now.Quote from: tom66 on August 15, 2025, 09:06:17 pmNow imagine what happens when that same performance is available in hardware costing $10, or when that $1000 worth of hardware has orders of magnitude more performance. What can be accomplished is a moving target.

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 07:26:57 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 15, 2025, 10:01:47 amOne of the biggest problems with this is that it destroys local river ecosystems, as the flora and fauna there is not able to cope with the higher water temperatures.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 08:20:46 am
content: It seems to me that we need to be finding ways to synergistically use the waste heat from datacenters as heating for other applications. (And I vaguely recall having heard of such things.) For example, using the cooling water for district heating, or to heat water for an industrial laundry, etc. It seems silly to be throwing away heat in some places, and then generating it in others. Sure, it’s sometimes unavoidable, but it seems to me that at leastsometimesit should be doable.Even if the effluent cooling water isn’t hot enough for a given application, it could still act as preheating to reduce the amount of added heat needed.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 08:45:45 am
content: Quote from: tooki on August 16, 2025, 08:20:46 amYep, they even have a name for that: cogeneration.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 09:07:31 am
content: Quote from: tooki on August 16, 2025, 08:20:46 amWorks well for datacenters in colder regions, and is indeed common enough in Sweden/Finlandhttps://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/microsoft-heats-finnish-homes-with-data-centre-heat-AH25ZbYB?refresh_ce=1https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171013-where-data-centres-store-info---and-heat-homesBut in countries with more temperate climates, there's about half the year where the heat is undesirable; and in desert climates that's year round. OpenAI wants to build a datacentre in UAE of all places, which sounds like a challenge from a cooling perspective.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 09:16:36 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 16, 2025, 09:07:31 amBetter than nothing, of course. If the heat-generating activity was otherwise very useful and already as efficient as possible, then it would be fair to call this an extra heat revenue.But in reality it's direct electric heating with extremely poor efficiency. Consider:* Even in Sweden/Finland, heating is needed maybe 60% / year* Distribution efficiency of district heating is estimated around 65% in various sources I have seenSo out of the power used, less than 40% generates useful heat.Install an air-source heat pump (in similar conditions, Sweden/Finland) and that increases to 250%. >6x better way to generate heat.So we need to be careful when discussing utilizing the waste heat. It'sgreatwhen it's truly about heat that otherwise goes to waste. But if we use that argument to rationalizegenerating the wasteto begin with, be very careful with the numbers. Recovery rate is much worse than in marketing speeches.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 09:36:22 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 15, 2025, 09:06:17 pmThat fact is being suppressed by OpenAI and others. Economic reasons.However, taking what BitCoin had and just saying, "There is money in processing AI token sets". No longer "proof of effort" burning 100kWh to get a single partial coin worth £30?If the "proof of work" was doing AI compute, then the all this waffle about not being able to multiply the data centre size by 1,000,000 like they need to is instantly taken care of.How many GPUs currently crypto mine?Then the model and AI interface they run goes "Open source" and the community own it because THEY have the largest data centre of the planet, not a single company.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 10:21:11 am
content: Quote from: paulca on August 16, 2025, 09:36:22 amEr, no, GPT-oss-20b was publicly released by OpenAI a few weeks ago and they explicitly outline how it has been optimised to run on consumer cards.It's clearly a response to DeepSeek and other competitors... levelling the playing field.It's only an open weights model, not a true open source model (you can't see how it was created or what training data was used).https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:00:31 pm
content: The logical solution is to build datacenters in cold climates.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:05:23 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 16, 2025, 12:00:31 pmYep and heat peoples homes with the waste heat.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:15:51 pm
content: Even better, for applications that don't need high bandwidth and low latency between nodes, put a few servers in every house!

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:23:26 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 16, 2025, 12:00:31 pmIt isn't, because we heating with 100% efficacy is already considered stone-age and we try to improve that with heatpumps, increasing that to 200-500%. 40% is completely unacceptable. See above.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:26:01 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 16, 2025, 12:15:51 pmSure, give me a task I can run at annual duty cycle of 5-10%, and I'm very happy to contribute 250W worth of my CPU/GPU time during hours that combine cheap electricity and low temperatures, and heat my upstairs a little bit.But I'm afraid that really isn't efficient. And the needs for data processing cannot be postponed like that. When people want to use ChatGPT, they are not willing to wait for 3 months to get the result.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 12:48:38 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 16, 2025, 12:15:51 pmThat would be a nightmare³ from a deployment and operations point of view.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 01:47:56 pm
content: It's also a problem because most homes don't have gigabit+ network connections to cache and storage nodes, UPS backups for power, and 24/7 access for maintenance techs.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 02:23:17 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on August 16, 2025, 12:26:01 pmIf heating is only needed 10% of the time or less (that pretty accurately describes my area, Austin, TX), you're not in the right area to take advantage of it.

author: Simmed
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 04:37:26 pm
content: from the webswells fargo gpu forecast tablefrom 2022 to 2025 = over 5million units of possibly H100each 1 is estimate about 10kW power drawso just H100 estimate islikely 2GW x amount of time a yearthis is good for sales of nvidiaand the power generation contractorsbut what did we gain

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2025, 06:30:05 pm
content: Quote from: Simmed on August 16, 2025, 04:37:26 pmFrom here:https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-hopper-architecture/nvidia-tensor-core-gpu-datasheetQuoteQuoteIt seems to say, the MAXIMUM configurable power draw per H100 (depending on type/version/variant), is in the 350..700 watt range.Is your 10kW figure, the total power consumption of an entire server, with many H100's in it, such as eight?In which case, your figures would seem to be too high.

author: indeterminate
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 10:07:40 am
content: Getting back to the original topic that started with a story published on the ABC 'aus'Data centre development applications in Victoria could see up to 20 gigalitres of water used annually if approved, according to FOI documents released to the ABC this weekI think sum clever clogs has worked out how to save on running costs even if it is a ludicrous wast of resources.One Million liters of tap water is about $300 in Melbourne if you just run it through a heat exchanger and dump it down the drain a couple of c hotterit makes for a very cheep AC system.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 10:16:51 am
content: Quote from: indeterminate on August 17, 2025, 10:07:40 amMy brother used to live in an apartment in London where air conditioning was retrofitted, it used a mechanism quite similar to that, it was a unit about the size of a hot water tank taking in cold water from the water network, using it to cool the air conditioner's heat exchanger, and then dumping it down the sewer. It used about 100L anhour... surprisingly enough these units are still sold and installed, and you can use one when a hosepipe ban is in effect (I guess because no one can tell unless they're in your house, as they have no vents.) Although, it does seem they are becoming less common nowadays... LG sold one last year, and I can't find a record of that any more.

author: Simmed
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 10:41:00 am
content: Quote from: MK14 on August 16, 2025, 06:30:05 pmmy bad10kW is the DGX rack indeed5million H100 would be maybe 2GW (not 50G)i then found a crude estimate of global drawmust be alot of waterQuote from: indeterminate on August 17, 2025, 10:07:40 amhttps://www.gww.com.au/accounts-billing/prices-charges/residential-prices-chargesthis 1 says its about $4 per m3

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 10:41:54 am
content: Can we stop using the word "used/uses". Unless it was turned in hydrogen and oxygen it's still water.You have to define "used".Poluted? Made undrinkable? Just made a 1*C warmed and returned to the river. etc.

author: kite31
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 11:32:20 am
content: Quote from: paulca on August 17, 2025, 10:41:54 amWhich is heat pollution.It is also a demand level unavailable to potential upstream consumers of the water.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 01:11:55 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 17, 2025, 10:41:54 amNo! IMO the words used/uses are correct here."Unless it was turned in hydrogen and oxygen it's still water." In this case the proper term should be consumed or converted or even destroyed.I would argue that is the the case where liquid water is evaporated completely into steam (as in the case of evaporative cooling towers) that is has beeneffectivelydestroyed. As far as it's usefulness as liquid water it has been destroyed, but from a physics persepective once released into the atmosphere it will eventually condense into water again. But not where it originally started out, or probably not in any place that is immediately useful, such as falling in the ocean vs a river somewhere were it is usable such as the Rhine River or the Colorado River both of which are desperately low of water.I think the distinction here is the difference between liquid water (what we commonly call "water" verses gaseous water, what we typically call "steam".But in terms or this discussion, water (liquid water) is destroyed when it gets converted to steam as part of a cooling process.It gets even more complicated when you talk about water that is only heated and then dumped back into environment or water that is polluted and then dumped back into the environment. Either one could be destroyed as far as it's original purpose (as intended by nature) is concerned but not destroyed as far as physics is concerned. It's those subtle distinctions that corporations, publicists, and shyster lawyers and greedy politicians rely on to confuse the general public.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 04:41:51 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 17, 2025, 10:41:54 amIt is 'used' because if reservoirs cannot replenish it fast enough a drought can occur.Very few countries directly process sewage into potable water; it's generally just minimally processed (or not, depending upon how competent the water authority is) so that it is relatively safe for the environment, discharged into rivers and the sea, and then makes its way back to reservoirs through the water cycle.But if reservoirs can't provide enough buffering through dry spells then we have a water shortage, even if the water was returned to the environment.This doesn't matter as much for countries like say Israel who produce the majority of their water from desalination (86% as of 2022), there, water use directly correlates with energy usage, but there is generally not much risk of actually running out of water.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2025, 05:20:23 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on August 16, 2025, 12:23:26 pmThat would be sound logic if we are only running the datacenters to make heat. But we don’t; we run them to provide data services, and the heat is waste. So if that waste heat is going to be produced anyway, does it matter that it’s not as efficient a heater as a heat pump? Assuming the waste heat fully met your house’s heating requirements, wouldn’t this mean your effective efficiency soared to ∞%, since your energy inputs have dropped to zero? How many data services can the heat pump provide?To me (ignoring the debate about whether we need this AI stuff to begin with), this is vaguely analogous to the debate about whether to use LED lamps inside kitchen ovens instead of “inefficient” incandescent lamps: sure, the incandescent lamp is only 5% efficient instead of 35% (or whatever it is), but we are heating the oven anyway, so the 95% waste heat from the incandescent lamp isn’t going to waste, as it would outside the oven.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 06:48:56 am
content: Quote from: tooki on August 17, 2025, 05:20:23 pmThat was my entire point. The whole discussion should be around (1) the necessity and (2) the efficiency of these data services. I have heard that producing this colossal amount of waste heat "is not a problem" because it can be used for e.g. district heating. I just showed this argument is totally wrong. Reclaim efficiency is so bad, that while better than nothing, we need to come back again evaluating the necessity and efficiency of the data services. Now it seems we are eager to accept them "just being there" because we can use their waste.And I claim that with the AI craze, both necessity and efficiency are going alarmingly down. People using Google search to go to facebook.com was being ridiculed; but now people using ChatGPT for checking 1+2, is like 5 orders of magnitude more energy intensive.Maybe LLMs are the future of human-machine interaction; there is a lot of potential. Currently they are too energy intensive, proven by the fact you can't run human-machine LLM UI on mobile device or even a desktop computer, and have to run it "in the cloud", and run it at a loss of money.Once your smartphone has enough CPU and memory to run the LLM so that it does not burn your hands, and you are willing to pay your energy bill, then I'm all fine with that. In the meantime, we are destroying our macroeconomy and environment with these chatbots, and being able to globally (on average) reclaim a few % of waste is relatively meaningless; it's a diversion.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 12:18:05 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on August 18, 2025, 06:48:56 amThat analysis and discussion has already been done through economics. What you are proposing is to ignore it and enforce your will, ultimately through violence; at the end of every regulation, are men with guns.I regularly hear the argument you are making in connection with Elon Musk wasting money on Starship, when he could be feeding the poor, or whatever.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 01:00:28 pm
content: Or simply wait for the AI bubble to burst.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 01:00:48 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on August 18, 2025, 12:18:05 pmEconomics doesn't (by definition) account for negative externalities. That is, for instance, why climate change and pollution mandates need to exist, because the default capitalist approach is to make money without any consideration of the impact of that activity.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 04:32:21 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on August 18, 2025, 12:18:05 pmI lost track where I suggested violence.In any case - economics is "not done". We only know how it turned out in bigger picture (macroeconomy as I mentioned) years from now. We are in the middle of a big thing, and I share your view of market self-regulation being preferable to overregulation, let alone violence.But discussing these things is also part of that free market, and free speech society.All I'm saying this will not end well with the current trajectory, and something needs to happen, in one way or another, and I also believe some significant changewillhappen.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2025, 05:02:19 pm
content: Quote from: tom66 on August 18, 2025, 01:00:48 pmI have referred twice now to two ways to account for negative externalities through economics, torts and Pigouvian taxes; which is used depends on the details of the situation. Politicians sometimes claim to implement the later, but they do not and instead defeat them with exceptions for their favored special interests, so just another way to pick winners and losers for their own benefit.Politicians actually love to use these methods against things which they disapprove of, like income and property ownership, maybe because they are so effective. But use them against pollution? No way.