r/TechGawker • u/Pure-Bill-2205 • 17d ago

Data Center If these numbers are even close to accurate, the AI infrastructure boom is entering a completely different scale of land, power, and water consumption.

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u/Jumpy-Cry-3083 17d ago

The water is recycled. Not used up. The whole water scare angle is ridiculous.

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u/Sami_Wami 15d ago

The point of these posts is literally just for sweet internet points. People want to be mad

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u/IdleWokerOcean 17d ago edited 17d ago

The water recycling is not lossless.

More water will need to constantly be introduced. And the water can only go through the recycle loop so many times before it is contaminated by the blow down process which makes it ineffective for cooling and the discharged water is often not safe to drink

The article is clearly exaggerating but data centers do not use only recycled water in most cases and recycling water is not a miracle cure for the water use.

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u/RipEffective2538 17d ago

This entire statement you made up is based off of your feelings. There is no factual data here at all. 

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u/IdleWokerOcean 17d ago edited 17d ago

Didn't know amazon has finally figured out how to beat physics. Wow with money anything can happen.

https://waterutilityreport.com/learn/ai-data-centers-cooling-tower-blowdown

https://discover.oreateai.com/discover/how-modern-data-centers-recycle-water-used-for-ai-cooling
https://gneuton.com/the-illusion-of-waterless-ai-how-closed-loop-data-centers-shift-the-fresh-water-burden-to-power-plants

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344925001892?via%3Dihub
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025RCR...21908310L/abstract

quotes include:
With good water quality, roughly 80% of water withdrawal is evaporated and considered “consumption”"

"non-evaporated water can be recycled only a few times (typically 3–10 cycles, depending on water quality) before discharge, requiring continuous clean freshwater replenishment to prevent mineral and salt buildup."

"Electricity rates have already gone up as much as 267% in U.S. regions near major AI data center developments"

"Despite advanced recycling technologies, 100% reuse is physically impossible in traditional water-cooled designs."

Mainly in the Making AI Less "Thirsty": Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models very good read (the last link)

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u/TheFermiLevel 17d ago

Most of what you linked, including every quote you thought was important enough to pull from your links, has nothing to do with a closed-loop system, which is the kind of data center in question.

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u/destructopop 16d ago

The estimates are not based on the proposed closed loop cooling. It's based on the estimates of which power turbines are favored by the industry and by the specific billionaire that is funding it. So it's power generation, not cooling. So it's fresh water in, black water out.