on a more positive note, I like the article thumbnail and how its not flat corporate artstyle art and reminds me of the designs of yesteryear
Sparking concerns. A-ha. Right. I could have asked why this shit is not banned for this reason alone, but sadly I know the answer
… 71% of the earth’s surface is covered in water.
Any water a data center uses comes out the other side as… Warm water and evaporation. It’s not lost to the world or anything. It’s just moving rain elsewhere.
AI datacenters are not latency sensitive so they can easily be built in optimal energy/water locations going forward. Just regulate them like we do other industries.
Did you just wrote that AI is increasing size of El Nino because of increased evaporation ? We can sue technological companies for hurricane damages ? Great !
They’re trying to get ahead of those pesky regulations right now. That’s the problem.
Seawater cannot be used for cooling, salt buildup will kill the system. Water involved in human activity is 100% freshwater, which is the the most scarce resource as in the article (human accessible is 1% of whole water). Desallination is energy intense process too.
Relatively easy, but expensive, problem to solve. We have all the salt water you need. Build nuclear plants and desalinate.
Stop allowing them to use the Colorado River.
I’m pretty sure desalinization doesn’t scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.
And it takes a lot of energy
it scales fine (roughly linear at large scale), people just don’t want to pay the energy cost because they think farms need cheap water.
Where would the salt go?
brine evaporation ponds
Where does the salt go after the water evaporates from the brine? You can’t just dump it back in the ocean, the concentration destroys wildlife.
Landfill? Salt deserts? It’s gotta go somewhere.
last I checked salt mining is still an industry
Why not just put it back in the fucking ocean?
Because that’s kills fish
How?
Take a bunch of salty water
Remove most of the water for other purposes
You now have to dispose of the same amount of salt, but less water. It’s hypersalinated, and toxic as fuck.
Yes but rain fall would mitigate this would it not?
Unfortunately not. It’s actually a real problem
You’re taking salt from a large volume and putting it in a small area all at once. It kills the fish
I guess if the plan was to sprinkle the salt over miles and miles of ocean, that could work. But that’s ridiculous to implement.
Well yeah I imagine airplanes would be used
For all the harm that this current AI craze has caused with its excessive power usage, I don’t get how water usage is a thing. I’ve been in many data centers with water cooled systems and they were all closed loop systems. The water was a heat transport mechanism. The weren’t using fresh water to gather the heat and then just dumping it on the ground. So how is this a problem?
They pump it out of aquifers then when done it goes down the drain to be processed and inevitably evaporated. The problem is we are pumping it out faster than it can naturally the aquifers. This causes long term environmental damage and at some point the aquifer will fail and no longer regenerate.
Welcome to the water wars.
Many of the AI/LLM focused DCs are using open loop systems. It’s stupid as fuck but, it’s cheap (as a large corporation).
I hope you’re all morally consistent and don’t eat beef, which requires 15,000 litres of fresh water per kilo.
I’m no expert by any means but why not just filter the salt out of fucking sea water?
The real shortage is the shortage of usable energy.
Entropy is what makes you able to use energy, but also what makes you lose energy.
