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Air cooling doesn’t scale. Try having thousands of computers all in your room.
Well sure but why does it need to be open cycle and actually consume water? That’s the problem part, not internal water cooling.
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
I’m a dummy: why do data centers have to consume water again? I have both computers and air conditioning and neither consume water. I’m assuming of course that evaporation cooling is cheaper and consumes less energy than closed cycle cooling with a forced air heat sink.
While air cooling doesn't scale, air also is not a great heat carrier when you cram that much power to a small space. Today's supercomputers (AI or not) can't cool themselves off with air. Too much heat in a too confined space. Direct Liquid Cooling is a must. However, you can use closed-loop liquid cooling (like Europe), but open-loop is cheaper since it skips the "pump the heat out from water to atmosphere" part an…
Yet look at the prices on e.g. Hetzner and how profitable US cloud is. They can easily afford to do closed loop.
Whenever there’s a real environmental problem the answer is usually “there’s a right way to do it that lacks these issues but it’s slightly more expensive.”
This article states that wastewater from the center contains nitrates at 56 ppm, but the local wells are testing above 70 ppm. It also targets the vector of contamination as being from percolation to groundwater from water treatment plants, which I'm guessing only a fraction of wastewater has the ability to leak through. This feels incredibly disingenuous, or at the least, incredibly poor journalism.
The original piece by rolling stone describes Amazon's role: - Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port m…
This article is misleading. The data centers role here was to evaporate a tiny bit of already polluted water and increase the concentration of the pollutant. The increase is estimated to be around .1% with reasonable assumptions. The primary driver of pollution was agriculture but the data centers can be attributed to .1% at most. Is it a big deal? Not in my opinion.
Depends. .1% increase in the number of calories going into my body? Not a big deal.
.1% increase in the number of radioactive particulates going into my body? Big deal.
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does it though? It provides a hypothesis, not an explanation.
It actually provides an explanation and not a hypothesis.
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It actually provides an explanation and not a hypothesis.
Or rather, a hypothesis disguised as an explanation. It ultimately said these nitrates come from farms, and this new datacenter is exacerbating it. The root cause is still the farms, though.
They provide an explanation, not a hypothesis.
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
It is but if a party mixes in another stream that normally speaking would not have found its way into the water purification system that system may no longer work. Amazon could of course just use closed loop systems like they are required by law to use elsewhere but chose not to.