this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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I've never seen any of these articles explain what this means. How is generative AI "using up" water. When a search uses a liter or whatever of water, what is happening to this water?
This is just nonsense that makes me think the author doesn't know either.
Water is often used in cooling servers. But it's contained and reused. It doesn't go anywhere, it's the vehicle to move heat from the servers to wherever else. In a pipe. In a closed loop. All these doomsday AI articles act like water is being lost permanently due to the use of these servers. Even if the water was escaping the closed system...did no one pay attention to the water cycle unit in grade school?!
It's not a sealed system like a personal computer uses. They're on a huge huge scale. They use evaporation / cooling towers. But those lose a certain amount of water to evaporation which needs to be replaced regularly.
just... use rain water and condensation pipes. Idk why that would be an issue at all
Because it's not using hot steam, but vapor, it's more like sweating.
The heat exchangers are sprayed with misted water, which evaporates and takes away heat. But the resulting vapor is still only slightly above ambient temperature and can't be reasonably condensated.