Apparently data centers routinely burn through water at a rate of about 1.9 liters per KWh of energy spent computing. Yet I can 🎮 HARDCORE GAME 🎮 on my hundreds-of-watts GPU for several hours, without pouring any of my Mountain Dew into the computer? Even if the PC is water cooled, the water cooling water stays in the computer, except for exceptional circumstances.
Meanwhile, water comes out of my A/C unit and makes the ground around it all muddy.
How am I running circles around the water efficiency of a huge AI data center, with an overall negative water consumption?
Yeah, if we just take heat pumps for example, or even cpu water coolers, the heat is carried away from where it’s hot to somewhere where it can be radiated off and equilibrium of heat conducting material and surrounding occurs.
You can bet your ass that these US data center are just brute forcing heat exchange via evaporation instead to make the initial investment cheaper. It’s the equivalent to burning coal instead of straight up going for the renewable but initially more costly option when it comes to energy production.