BeepMar 12

The King's Art

https://lemmus.org/post/20796029

Show threadFauxLivingMar 13

Just for perspective, since this anti-AI meme handwringing about water won’t die.

The US Corn industry alone uses 8x more water than all of the AI datacenters on the entire planet. 40% of that production is used to make fuels which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.

The water used by datacenters is evaporated and remains part of the local hydrological cycle. Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn’t significant.

Local power usage, local noise pollution, unsustainable investments made by capricious capitalists… those are all legitimate areas of criticism for AI datacenters. Water use is not.

Show threadMinnesotaGoddamMar 13
so those datacenters Iran is blowing up in the desert then… hooray?
Show threadFauxLiving

Yeah.

I’m not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions… but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.

Mar 13 at 10:40amWeb
Show threadMinnesotaGoddamMar 13
i just wish we had a good way of using, i dunno, seawater or something.
Show threadFauxLivingMar 13

They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.

The reason that they don’t is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.

If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn’t be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.

This is a very solvable issue… even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It’s just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.

Show threadFatalMar 13

A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.

Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that as circulated water “consumed” by the data center despite the fact they, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.