This a fight going on in Idaho right now:
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...
If you look at a google map of Ada County Idaho, the only viable agriculture land requires watering from the Snake and Boise Rivers.
There are areas with lots of land, water and much lower ave air temps in the US and some have empty buildings that can be retrofitted for use as data centers. But no, lets build in places that allow the company treat their employees as slaves.
> Many data centers rely on evaporative cooling, or “swamp cooling,” where warm air is drawn through wet pads. Data centers typically evaporate about 80% of the water they draw, discharging 20% back to a wastewater treatment facility, according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
I did some research on additional cost of water + increased efficiency of the condenser, but it's not just that. The water needs to be treated, otherwise it leaves way too much sediment.
By the way "spray the condenser" technology is very very rare because it's pretty much worst of both worlds and nowhere near as good or efficient as a cooling tower but much more maintenance than a dry cooler + compressor. Typically for high efficiency modern sites you'd be looking at cooling towers or dry cooler + compressor for water facilities or spray the water directly onto the air (direct or indirect adiabatic) for air based facilities.
To complicate things many (typically city DCs/Colos/ enterprise facilities) are air based facilities that convert to water by using heat exchangers in the datahalls.
But modern environmentalism is a religion and this is how it works. Any human advancement needs a narrative on how it hurts the planet.
Why would a for-profit not hurt the environment for more profit if it isn't illegal and won't get them sued (for more than they profited)? There's a rich history of them doing exactly that. Similarly, governments have done horrific environmental damage and it was up to environmentalists to create the awareness to make it stop.
I honestly don't know how you can look at a world with record numbers of wildfires, communities fighting over water supplies, and for-profit companies say that water beyond subsistence levels isn't a human right and think "oh yeah, environmentalists are looking for a reason why this water-consuming thing is bad".
Especially when the same technology could be powered in a way that doesn't pollute as much and cooled in a way that doesn't consume as much water -- if only the environment was more important than shareholders.
Honestly, 6500 households of water a day is nothing. Individual cities often write more than this off in a day when rain overwhelms their watershed systems.
Even with perfect watershed recovery our ability to treat, utilize, and transport it back without losses is a far bigger concern. The average age of pipes in the US is approaching 50 years old. I've seen reports project the US will need to invest nearly 1T in the next 15 years to sustain the current system and rate of growth.
Hell, there was a 54 inch water main break in Detroit this winter that flooded ~120 homes. A conservative estimate for a pipe of that size leaking all of its water for 5-6 hours is 20-25,000,000 gallons of water. We're going to be seeing a lot more of that.
Another thing I see overlooked constantly is that many of these DCs are augmented with their own filtration systems which allow them to primarily consume greywater for a net gain.
Merely building a functioning bypass for a pipe of this size at this depth takes the better part of a year. Replacing it? Out in the suburbs some of the projects to repair pipes from the 40s that leaked and caused sinkholes are still ongoing, they started over 20 years ago.
A lot of stuff doesn't need 10ms latency. Why not move it somewhere that has geothermal, or abundant water, or say an ocean to dump heat into.
Seems like the approach is always to bring the resource to the datacenter instead
mitchbob•6h ago