this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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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...

Notable comments:

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.

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[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

If you remove the thermostat and redline it in a garage it still won’t be able to keep up because it doesn’t have the airflow that’s required

The concept of closed loop cooling for servers has always existed and it works for home computers. What is conventionally called closed loop cooling just means that you transfer heat from the computer to a liquid and then from the liquid to air. Transferring 100MW of heat to the air is what makes this difficulty especially in a stationary computer.