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What the Cloud Actually Drinks from "AI’s Water Problem Is Smaller Than You Think" on @hackernoon https://hackernoon.com/ais-water-problem-is-smaller-than-you-think
For years, the environmental conversation about computing was about carbon. Water was an afterthought, buried in sustainability reports under "operational metrics." That was a mistake, because the physics were never subtle.
Here's how a conventional data center stays alive. Heat from the chips is carried out of the server hall by a closed loop of coolant, which dumps it into a second, open loop — the cooling tower — where water is sprayed into moving air and deliberately allowed to evaporate. It's a spectacularly efficient way to move heat, the same trick your body uses when it sweats. It is also, by definition, consumptive: that water doesn't go back to the river. It goes into the sky. Depending on climate and tuning, this costs between 1 and 9 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of server energy.
For years, the environmental conversation about computing was about carbon. Water was an afterthought, buried in sustainability reports under "operational metrics." That was a mistake, because the physics were never subtle.
Here's how a conventional data center stays alive. Heat from the chips is carried out of the server hall by a closed loop of coolant, which dumps it into a second, open loop — the cooling tower — where water is sprayed into moving air and deliberately allowed to evaporate. It's a spectacularly efficient way to move heat, the same trick your body uses when it sweats. It is also, by definition, consumptive: that water doesn't go back to the river. It goes into the sky. Depending on climate and tuning, this costs between 1 and 9 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of server energy.