Comment on Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks agoI don’t understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
Closed loop watercooling is really just air cooling with extra steps. The water is heated by the devices and cooled by a large radiator with fans. Or it’s cooled with a chiller which in turn is cooled by a radiator with fans.
Replacing the water is the most effective (yet wasteful) way to remove the heat.
I once saw a spa that was using a liquid cooled bank of computers to heat their pool water. It involves a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger so they’re not pumping chlorinated pool water through their servers but…I wish we did more of that. Server farms are a source of heat, lots of other things need heat.
To a point, yes. While you’re still using air to cool the water, I think it’s still a little more efficient than blindly keeping the server room at a low-ish temperature.
Keeping the server room cool is just using an air conditioner which is cooled by a radiator with a fan, and then using that cooled air to cool another radiator with a fan. Every step is a loss of efficiency.
The main advantage of water loops is that you get to use a different form factor for the radiator and fan by moving it away from the source of heat and aren’t limited by the case dimensions.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Because closed loops are more expensive in the short term, making it a non-starter
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I guess water is cheep enough.
Still kinda obnoxious though. Like they couldn’t see that the ultra high water usage was the thing that would get the most pushback from?