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How about both? During a long drought why shouldn’t people be mad at a multinational company sucking up water to use for their international tech products?
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6% of the water is effectively being used by billions of people. That’s pretty efficient versus keeping lawns greener for a few thousand people who insist on using non-native plants for landscaping.
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I’m saying that 6% isn’t a lot considering the number of people effectively using that water.
It’s like when people moan about California having to pipe in water for its agriculture without considering how many people outside of California are eating that food.
I’m actually curious on the water usage. How is it being utilized that it is completely removed from circulation? Or is it simply being used, dumped into the cities return, and used again?
Because water running through a datacenter… sounds like perfectly drinkable water. Maybe a little warm?
In every water cooling loop for consumer grade computing hardware, the water is cycled through for hundreds (thousands?) of hours before servicing is needed. I think it would be pretty easy for a company with such massive resources to have some sort of small on site water treatment facility or filtration system. Swimming pools filter their water, why can’t data centers?
I don’t think the water would be potable after running through that sort of hardware because the piping is probably not safe for transporting drinking water, especially at high temperatures when different chemicals could leech into the water. There’s also fittings, lubricants, anti-microbial additives, etc. that would further complicate things.
Doubtful that this is using traditional per-device water cooling. I’m betting that this is traditional hot row/cold row cooling and there is an evaporative component of the HVAC coolant loop to reduce the power requirements of the system as a whole.
Lemmy loves to shit on MS but they are constantly innovating in efficient data centers because spending less to operate directly reduces their expenditures, which directly equals profit on a service with fixed costs and multi-year reservations like Azure.
You can bet that if the solution was as simple as what you suggest that they would have been doing it for years, but the thermal considerations for one machine and the thermal considerations for 100,000 machines are not the same. The #1 priority to operate that many systems is to use as little power as possible because power is not only the biggest expense but also the primary limiting factor on the total number of systems you can host.
Just wait until 2050, when the handful of remaining hyper-mega-conglomerates form a single capitalist hydra and decree “the only option to the planet dying from our obscene consumerism and overconsumption is to genocide the poorest 1 billion”… and they’ll have a 56% public approval rating because all murders are conducted using fully autonomous killbots, so we don’t have to sacrifice our children.
And in 2060 it’ll be the poorest 5 billion.
And in 2070 it’ll be the poorest 99%.
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That won’t happen. They love the ultra poor because they are so economically desperate that they can make them do anything by dangling a few pennies in front of them.
I chuckle every time someone says that AI is going to take all the jobs. Ok, so are the AI going to buy all the products?
Yup, corporations love to shift blame to consumers.
I’m confused, why would they consume water? Why wouldn’t they water cool with a closed loop system, or, better yet, a system that draws water from these rivers, and dumps the warm water back in?
Dumping warm water back into these systems usually is even worse as it can cause a host of issues for wildlife. A closed loop system should definitely be used though.
