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?
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?
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.
Had to check image was not AI
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…
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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?
Unfortunately not. It’s actually a real problem
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.
Where would the salt go?
brine evaporation ponds
Where does the salt go after the water evaporates from the brine? You can’t just dump it back in the ocean, the concentration destroys wildlife.
Landfill? Salt deserts? It’s gotta go somewhere.
Sell it for cheap to barbecue houses
Sea salt as a food additive would get cheaper probably.
last I checked salt mining is still an industry
Loss? They consume it?
https://tube.blahaj.zone/w/qEcczobJGVGmBe2rbWJkMN
There is air cooled water chillers and water cooled water chillers. Depending on what the companies go with they could have water cooled chillers causing the water loss. Air cooled chillers don’t really have that problem because they don’t have the same cooling situation. I attached a video of a water cooled chiller
No, they don’t consume. Instead, they use it for cooling their servers. You might have heard of a way to cool a computer that is more effective than a fan called water cooling. It basically uses water to absorb the hot air from the GPU/CPU to be sent to the radiator where the water is cooled and sent back to be pumped and continue the cycle. This is called a closed-loop water cooling system. These big “AI” databases are also using water to cool the components like how they’re being used in the computer, but unlike the example, it’s not a closed-loop water cooling system, meaning that instead of the water being reused, it instead gets evaporated and participates in the water cycle. The problem with this is that water used in these open-loop systems is evaporated, meaning it is remove from the local water cycles, making fresh water less accessible in areas that already face shortages, so while the amount of fresh water on Earth stays the same, it becomes inaccessible to the people, which leads to the current situation where more than a billion people don’t have enough access to fresh water while big “AI” databases are using over 100 million liters daily. This is only one of the alarming consequences of “AI”. This however could be easily fixed by using a closed-loop water cooling systems that use renuable energy sources for the energy required to pump and cool the system. However, sadly, in our current capitalist society, the rich are too greedy and corrupt to save lives and actually help the people.
Evaporated? That would require a heat exchanger to pump heat over 100°C on the water side. That pays out?
Edit: Hey guys, is this an AI or not?
I get why you’d ask, but I don’t think so. Seems to just be a case of English as a second language to me.
I see the confusion. In this case, evaporating doesn’t happen the natural way of boiling at 100 degrees celcius. Instead, these data centers mostly use things called cooling towers, where the warm water is sprayed into the air and some of it evaporates. It’s not technically “consumed”, because again, I emphasise that water doesn’t dissapear. It instead goes through the water cycle, but this evaporating removes water from the local supply, which can be a problem in water-scarce areas.
I don’t get this either, they just heat the water
… 71% of the earth’s surface is covered in water.
Any water a data center uses comes out the other side as… Warm water and evaporation. It’s not lost to the world or anything. It’s just moving rain elsewhere.
AI datacenters are not latency sensitive so they can easily be built in optimal energy/water locations going forward. Just regulate them like we do other industries.
Did you just wrote that AI is increasing size of El Nino because of increased evaporation ? We can sue technological companies for hurricane damages ? Great !
They’re trying to get ahead of those pesky regulations right now. That’s the problem.
Seawater cannot be used for cooling, salt buildup will kill the system. Water involved in human activity is 100% freshwater, which is the the most scarce resource as in the article (human accessible is 1% of whole water). Desallination is energy intense process too.
seawater is also corrosive and it will kill wildlife around it, that is not the ocean.
pretty sure technetium is more scarce
Can we stop using religious terms to describe the real world, please?
I think you’re maybe confusing scarce with sacred?
rereads the title
Yes, that would be accurate.
Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for letting me know.
It’s all good. My fiancé misreads things all the time. I’m a writer and she has dyslexia so it’s essentially a reflex of mine to help out when this happens 😂
Which one is the religious term?
The word “scarce”, when misreading it as “sacred”, when I just woke up
