Data centers, whose expansion is being fueled dramatically by the artificial intelligence boom, have a far bigger carbon footprint than previously estimated, according to a new study. The sprawling, power-hungry sites, used to store critical IT infrastructure like servers, are being built worldwide by companies and countries as AI applications…
They usually do. They just do the same thing a lot of nuclear reactors do and also evaporatively cool one end of the heat exchange loop.
As far as I can see they don’t ever do it that way, that’s the problem, if it was a closed loop they wouldn’t be pulling water from the mains and causing water pressure issues for everybody else.
They cool the hot side of the loop with running water, like reactors do, rather than using air.
So the loop is closed, but they’re using running water to cool it off faster, rather than needing a bigger radiator on the hot side.
That’s not what they’re doing though. That would be fine that’s just a heat exchanger.
What they are doing is pulling water from the mains to cool the system either directly or to cool an internal system via heat exchanger and then are dumping hot water back into the environment. They’re not pumping the water to cooling ponds and letting it cool back down and then pulling the water back out of the cooling ponds to use again.
I was thinking more along the lines of the big evaporative cooling towers you see with a lot of reactors, since they rely on vaporisation to cool off, most of that water can’t be reused, short of getting picked up in the water cycle again.
Hmmm can they … add a turbine?
Unfortunately not. Computing hardware doesn’t get that hot.
The chips would be fried if you had them at the temperatures where they were generating enough steam to run a turbine.