A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure

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• rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling. Like a laptop or cellphone, the chips housed in data centers can easily overheat — generally requiring a lot of water to cool them.

  The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation.

  I’ve never heard of water shortages due to construction needing so much. WTH are they doing on those sites if what Blackrock says is true?

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  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The data centers they are building are mind boggling huge. Imagine Manhattan in NYC.

    The Utah data center will be 2.5 x the entire size of Manhattan in NYC.

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    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      holy shit

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  • kowanatsi@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Lying

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  • DillDough@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Big fucking “if” considering that company almost exclusively makes false statements lol

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• riskable@programming.dev ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  For those wondering how TF a data center that is not even online yet could be using so much water:

  • Soil compaction
  • Dust suppression

  That’s it. For the scale of that project, that’s all it would take to use 30 million gallons.

  When they’re done, they also need to flush miles of pipes which could also use a few million gallons but I don’t think they’re at that phase yet.

  This amount of water would be used no matter what buildings they were constructing in that amount of space. Meaning: This article is pretty misleading clickbait (because a lot of people hate data centers lately, the headline will generate clicks).

  The alternative is to have loads of data centers instead of one big one. That’s more expensive, so they build a single big one.

  If you don’t like data centers, it makes sense to build a few really, really big ones like this rather than lots of smaller ones. Because data centers are necessary and important aspects of modern living. They’re not going to just go away. There’s nothing that could replace them.

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  • EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The circlejerk for Ai simps is on Twitter. You seem to be lost.

    AI DATACENTERS DO NOT NEED TO BE BUILT AND COMPANIES SHOULD BE EXPANDING THEIR CURRENT PROPERTIES, NOT RUINING ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS FOR GIANT BUILDINGS MEANT TO HOUSE ELECTRONICS

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The thing is, we could harvest the heat and use it to generate energy instead of burning thru a natural resource were short of.

  It would just be expensive, and capitalism always takes the cheapest route regardless of anything else.

  Obviously it’s not going to be much energy generation, but “waste heat” is only a thing if you’re wasting it. And at this scale it’s not insignificant, we shouldn’t be wasting it.

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  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not really. Despite the CPU running super hot, the water in a water cooling loop is a couple degrees C above ambient. Carnot’s law, which provides the theoretical maximum energy extraction not accounting for any real world loss, means you can’t get significant energy from a couple of degrees C temp difference.

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    • bluGill@fedia.io ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You can get just enough energy for a science fair demonstration. Which scaled up to a data center size is a lot of energy. What the science fair misses is how much energy goes into making the system - You can generate what looks like a lot of power until you realize that the generators and such needed more energy to make than you will get back.

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    • notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      How do heat pumps work if this is true?

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