To be fair, the article linked this idiotic one
about OpenAI’s “thirsty” data centers, where they talk about water “consumption” of cooling cycles… which are typically closed-loop systems.
But even then, is the water truly consumed? Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant? Or does the water just get warm and then either be pumped into a water body somewhere or ideally reused to heat homes?
There’s loads of problems with the energy consumption of AI, but I don’t think the water consumption is such a huge problem? Hopefully, anyway.
It evaporates. A lot of datacenters use evaporative cooling. They take water from a useable source like a river, and make it into unuseable water vapor.
Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant?
This doesn’t happen unless the reactor was sabotaged. Cooling water that interacts with the core is always a closed-loop system. For exactly this reason.
Search for “water positive” commitment. You will quickly see it’s a “goal” thus it is consequently NOT the case. In some places where water is abundant it might not be a problem, where it’s scarce then it’s literally a choice made between crops to feed people and… compute cycles.
To be fair, the article linked this idiotic one about OpenAI’s “thirsty” data centers, where they talk about water “consumption” of cooling cycles… which are typically closed-loop systems.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-ai-water-consumption
They are typically closed-loop for home computers. Datacenters are a different beast and a fair amount of open-loop systems seem to be in place.
But even then, is the water truly consumed? Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant? Or does the water just get warm and then either be pumped into a water body somewhere or ideally reused to heat homes?
There’s loads of problems with the energy consumption of AI, but I don’t think the water consumption is such a huge problem? Hopefully, anyway.
It evaporates. A lot of datacenters use evaporative cooling. They take water from a useable source like a river, and make it into unuseable water vapor.
This doesn’t happen unless the reactor was sabotaged. Cooling water that interacts with the core is always a closed-loop system. For exactly this reason.
Search for “water positive” commitment. You will quickly see it’s a “goal” thus it is consequently NOT the case. In some places where water is abundant it might not be a problem, where it’s scarce then it’s literally a choice made between crops to feed people and… compute cycles.