Fury Mounts over a Global A.I. Frenzy

Why we need fusion?

Megacorps are driving up energy prices for everyone, locals seem powerless to stop these environmentally destructive data centers from draining the water table. All so the magnificent 7 can attempt to capture any remaining attention we have left.

In the past large developments would win over local government support with promises of jobs and investment in the local economy.

Now the only promises are a strained grid, higher energy bills and loud noise. It doesn't help that AI has been falsely attributed as the reason to lay people off in the past few years by CEOs who are actually just cutting costs or moving jobs offshore.

This situation probably gets worse before it gets better for the companies deploying new data centers.

Why can’t the water for cooling these be a closed-loop system?

Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but water that's been used once for cooling can't be used again until something else, possibly time or other natural processes, has cooled the water itself off, right?

One option would be to install a water cooling system in the loop. Sure, that could easily double the facility’s power requirements, but that’s better than depleting limited water resources. Any power capacity built out for AI will likely find other uses if/when that bubble pops.

How do you cool the closed loop?

They probably could, but then electricity consumption goes up because in a lot of places the temperatures required are below ambient. I'm seeing quotes that place desired water temperature around 80F, which is below ambient temperatures in most of the US at least part of the year.

It takes less energy to get fresh water that's 85F and cool it to 80F than recycle 90F water and cool it to 80F.

Also, I think the only truly "consumed" water is from evaporative coolers. Unless I'm mistaken, they start with potable and end up with warmer potable water. I don't think there's a reason it couldn't be fed into the water grid, where it should cool back down naturally. I guess the problem is when the datacenter requires more water than the rest of the water grid so you end up producing excess potable water.

Is this true?

The water loop is the cooling system. If you had a way to get rid of the heat from this new cooling system you could have just used it directly in the first place.

Guess what, they would figure it out if they were charged more for their non-life giving water use, vs the rest of us just trying to drink

Sure, that, plus the catastrophic cumulative effects of anthropogenic climate disruption, that will render large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, resulting in billions of climate refugees, that we’re likely already locked in / inevitably going to see in the not too distant future.

I think it is just cheaper as long as you have cheap/free water you can evaporate. Otherwise you would have to have to run a closed loop cooling system using regular AC tech (eg. some low boiling point liquid at low pressure, compressor, evaporator/condenser), that would be presumably more expensive to operate (but would not need lots of water to evaporate when operating).

There does seem a bit of a misallocation of capital. It would be different if people really wanted most of the AI stuff.

Main "issue" is that evaporative cooling is just ridiculously effective compared to a normal heat exchanger with only air.

You can use water or air internally but then to get rid of the heat from the facility there aren't many choices. You either put it into the air which is cheap, into nearby water bodies which has other environmental concerns, or into the ground which is expensive. The air is the simplest, cheapest solution and using water for evaporative cooling in dryer climates makes it even better

> do drain the water table

No. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake