Warm water is the waste product because it’s easier dump the water than to cool the water. Returning the warm water to a usable state is much more expensive at scale.
you might be right but some numbers might back up your claim. I doubt that servers could heat water as much as a nuclear reactor. datacenter coolers certainly don't have to pressurize the water to prevent it from boiling, it doesn't get that hot.
At Meta we have a massive system for cutting out our net effect on water for the local area. I’m in NM and the DC here is almost actually adding to the water. I can’t imagine Microsoft would behind as to not do this. It’s an open design.
I live here and people are getting priority over AI?
Iowa isn’t like many states where there is water scarcity. This cooling water isn’t even being consumed. It’s used for cooling and returned to the waste water system.
If you want to talk about water treatment capacity, then sure. Treatment capacity is used for cooling.
That’s not what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about the mass of water being consumed (i.e., removed) from the watershed. The water removed from the river for cooling is returned. There is no net loss of water.
There is a net loss of potable water (or potable water capacity, if you prefer), which is often a capacity bottleneck before non-potable water due to the infrastructure required to generate it. However, according to a comment above, Microsoft is using evaporative coolers, which specifically work by losing water (through evaporation). It’s not a 100% loss rate to the watershed, but it’s not net zero either
here’s the relevant section from the pimentel paper
Water use in livestock production. The production of animal protein requires significantly more water than the production of plant protein (Pimentel et al. 2004). Although US livestock directly uses only 2% of the total water used in agriculture (Solley et al. 1998), the indirect water inputs for livestock pro- duction are substantial because of the water required for forage and grain crops. Each year, a total of 253 million t grain are fed to US livestock, requiring a total of about 25 × 1013 L water (Pimentel et al. 2004). Worldwide grain production specifically for livestock requires nearly three times the amount of grain that is fed to US livestock and three times the amount of water used in the United States to produce grain feed (Pimentel et al. 2004).
Animal products vary in the amounts of water required for their production (table 2). For example, producing 1 kg chicken requires 3500 L water, whereas producing 1 kg sheep (fed on 21 kg grain and 30 kg forage) requires approximately 51,000 L water (table 2; USDA 2003, Pimentel et al. 2004). If cattle are raised on open rangeland and not in confined feed- lot production, 120 to 200 kg forage are required to produce 1 kg beef. This amount of forage requires 120,000 to 200,000 L water per kg (Pimentel et al. 2004), or a minimum of 200 mm rainfall per year (Pimentel et al. 2004).
Agricultural production in the United States is projected to expand to meet the increased food needs of the US pop- ulation, which is expected to double in the next 70 years (USBC 2003). Developing countries are expected to feel the impacts of this food crisis to a greater extent as demands ap- proach those of developed countries and populations continue to rise (Rosegrant et al. 2002). Increasing crop yields neces- sitate a parallel increase in the use of fresh water in agricul- ture. Therefore, increased crop and livestock production during the next 5 to 7 decades will significantly increase the demand on all water resources, especially in the western, southern, and central United States (USDA 2003) and in many regions of the world with low rainfall.
so it looks like the methodology isn’t even explicit in this paper, and we need to see pimentel’s OTHER 2004 publication to understand how he arrived at the water values. MY SUSPICION is that he includes the water used in, for instance, cotton production to add to the sum used in livestock. that’s at best an oversight: that “use” is actually a conservation of resources. given that i do see soy mentioned, i would also guess that it’s including the waste product from soybean oil production, which accounts for 85% of the global crop weight but only 17% of the end use weight. the remaining ~68% of the global crop weight would be waste if not fed to livestock.
i can dig into the further methodology after work, but you should be dubious about these claims, especially the original source, which seems to be intentionally misrepresenting the USGS paper.
the USGS paper says almost no water goes to livestock
Combined withdrawals for livestock and aquaculture were less than 3 percent of the total water withdrawals in 2005. Livestock withdrawals include water for livestock, feedlots, and dairy operations, and accounted for 2,140 Mgal/d, most of which (60 percent) was supplied by groundwater.
I gotta wonder though, water used for server cooling is basically just run through metal fixtures and returned right? Couldn’t it be possible to force some kind of maintenance and cleanliness standards onto the equipment and just have the water return to the supply? Is there any reason that water wouldn’t be just as drinkable after?
They probably treat the water to prevent mineral and bacterial build up. No matter how sanitary it is it will probably require some amount of treatment before it can be put back into public drinking supplies.
Well, all sewer water requires treatment before it’s used again but this water doesn’t go into the sewer, it’s evaporative cooling so it goes into the air.
No, but I assume you’d have to build extra infrastructure for that, which is expensive. They might now consider it worth it if they continue to need that much water, though.
They use evaporative cooling on days where it is over 85f
Microsoft’s data centers currently use adiabatic cooling, which relies on outside air to cool down temperatures inside. It’s a system that uses less electricity than air conditioning and less water than cooling towers. But when temperatures rise above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, outside air isn’t very helpful. At that point, an evaporative cooling system kicks in, which uses water. It works like a “swamp cooler” — cooling the air by pushing it over or through water-soaked screens.
AI Tools - plural. ChatGPT (and OpenAI as a whole) predominantly runs on Azure infrastructure. Microsoft also owns GitHub with its associated copilot. And now all the Microsoft product specific copilots.
Not trying to defend their usage, but there are several forests here that are quite visible.
If it’s just for cooling, wouldn’t they just be able to pull water directly from a lake and then return the same water into the lake? Why is any consumption happening?
Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.
There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn't be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.
There's probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There's some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.
You don’t cool down hot water with the same amount of cool water. You use a shit ton of cool water, because the larger the difference in temps the faster the heat exchange.
So the discharge isn’t water that’s really hot. It’s just warmer than when it went in.
Maybe 5-10 degrees, which is enough for a negative environmental impact if constantly discharged into a lake/ocean/river, but not hot enough to be good for anything.
They could do large underground reserve for cold water, cool their servers with it, then dump it into a second tank that eventually cools and is added to the reserve. It’s not complicated, but it is a huge upfront cost.
Companies aren’t going to do it when they can pay a fraction of the cost even tho it fucks over everyone else. This is capitalism, we need regulations forcing them to do the right thing over the cheap thing.
I suppose that's very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.
In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.
The reason that we don’t do these things is rather mundane: it’s cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes – something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don’t think it’s a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.
A lot of problems we don’t solve boil down to “it’s boring and expensive” lol it’s sad when you think about it. Everyone says they want infrastructure investment because they think it sounds mature or whatever, but when the day comes, they shake their heads.
I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?
It probably doesn't make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn't needed.
Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.
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