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?
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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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).
Yeah I’ve been reading up on this and it’s just stupidly wasteful.
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.
I hope you're all morally consistent and don't eat beef, which requires 15,000 litres of fresh water per kilo.
Don’t worry, I’ll stop using my swamp cooler this summer
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
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.
Because it’s expensive to do that at scale. I’m sure we’ll get to a point where it’s necessary to do that, but the capitalist machine doesn’t want to “waste money” on that.
Capitalism is a fucking disease.
Capitalism is annoying yes but it's leaps and bounds better than communism
Um… nobody brought up communism? Just because I said one thing is bad does not mean that I’m advocating for something else.
Capitalism and Communism are not the only two options for a functional society (and I’d argue that neither of them are healthy long term solutions).
I've been having a heated argument with another gentleman about the subject of communism on a separate subLemmy, I clearly carried over the attitude and I apologize.
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.
seawater is not all saltwater, its a bunch of other chemicals in it too.
I'm pretty sure desalinization doesn't scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.
we can use them for some sort of project like building a pyramid out of salt, and it will become the perfect venue to host league of legends tournaments.
I feel like those tournaments usually have more salt than they can handle already...
Why not just put it back in the fucking ocean?
Because that's kills fish
How?
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
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?
And it takes a lot of energy
which may not be an issue since companies running AI stuff are planning to deploy civilian mini nuclear reactors around the country
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.
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