Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
Car cooling systems are stupidly expensive, run at temps that would damage computer CPUs, run outside, and have a really nice advantage over computers which is that at higher heat loads they also tend to go faster thus cooling them off faster.
Now imagine you redlined a dozen cars for days on end in a garage in the middle of the summer do you think you might damage some components?
It is still very possible to use closed loop cooling on data centers but any system you build needs to be able to work in summer temps which can be as high as 35-40C and needs to do that without letting the computers exceed 60C. An air cooled system to handle that much heat is going to be very expensive and use a ton of power (and power generation also uses water)
While you’re effectively right in your comparison, you also must understand the difference between electronic data center cooling vs vehicle engine cooling.
Vehicle engines run best at a higher temperature range than electronics, so they install a thermostat, to literally bring the engine temperature up to a suitable range for ideal performance. But the thermostat is not necessary (unless you live near cold polar regions and want heat).
The thermostat can be safely removed from vehicles in more comfortable climates and the vehicle will run just fine, but just quite a bit cooler.
So, take the concept of a closed loop cooling system, remove the thermostat from the equation, and you got a more viable closed loop system more suitable to keep electronics cool.