this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Apparently data centers routinely burn through water at a rate of about 1.9 liters per KWh of energy spent computing. Yet I can ๐ŸŽฎ HARDCORE GAME ๐ŸŽฎ on my hundreds-of-watts GPU for several hours, without pouring any of my Mountain Dew into the computer? Even if the PC is water cooled, the water cooling water stays in the computer, except for exceptional circumstances.

Meanwhile, water comes out of my A/C unit and makes the ground around it all muddy.

How am I running circles around the water efficiency of a huge AI data center, with an overall negative water consumption?

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[โ€“] Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Why are they not using a closed loop system with condensers collecting the evaporated water?

[โ€“] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

I'll give you one gue$$

[โ€“] SaltSong@startrek.website 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A condenser will generate the same amount of heat that they are trying to dissipate.

[โ€“] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Collect and condense the hot water vapor, concentrate the heat until you've got steam; then pump it through a steam turbine recapturing that energy as electricity.

I'm sure there's some difficulties and nuances I'm not seeing right away, but it would be nice to see some sort of system like this. Most power plants generate heat, then turn that into electricity. Data centers take electricity and turn it back into heat. There's gotta be a way to combine the two concepts.

[โ€“] SaltSong@startrek.website 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

The difficulty is, to put it in very simple terms, is that physics doesn't allow that. The less simple explanation is a thermodynamics textbook, and trust me, you don't want that.

Everything generates heat. Everything. Everything. Anything that seems to generate "cold" is generating more heat somewhere else.

[โ€“] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, thermodynamics are a thing. I'm not trying to claim some free energy system saying you could power the whole data center; but if you could re-capture some of the waste heat and convert it back into electricity, putting that energy to work instead of just venting to atmosphere, it could potentially help offset some of the raw electrical needs. An efficiency improvement, that's all.

[โ€“] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 2 points 19 hours ago

Yeah, if we just take heat pumps for example, or even cpu water coolers, the heat is carried away from where it's hot to somewhere where it can be radiated off and equilibrium of heat conducting material and surrounding occurs.
You can bet your ass that these US data center are just brute forcing heat exchange via evaporation instead to make the initial investment cheaper. It's the equivalent to burning coal instead of straight up going for the renewable but initially more costly option when it comes to energy production.

[โ€“] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

Actually more because thermodynamics is a cruel mistress.

[โ€“] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A condenser can be as simple as a glass dome in a cool room. There is no need for any electricity or heat.

[โ€“] SaltSong@startrek.website 1 points 21 hours ago

Note your use of the word "cool."

[โ€“] obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretty sure the glass dome traps the heat they're trying to dissipate.

[โ€“] Kolanaki@pawb.social -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's literally there to let evaporated water cool and become liquid again. ๐Ÿคฆโ€โ™‚๏ธ

[โ€“] Goodeye8@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

And what happens to the heat? Heat can't just magically disappear which means water can't cool without heat being able to dissipate somewhere. So it would have to dissipate heat into the dome. What happens to the dome if you keep pumping hot vapor into the dome? It heats up. If it heats up the water vapor stops cooling and the entire cooling system stops working.

I'm not saying it couldn't work in theory, I'm saying it doesn't work in practice because the dome would have insanely big, maybe the size of small nation big.