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.
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.