alt Hacker NewsNew Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
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hn993302 • today at 1:41 AM
Got an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
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New Gen data centers are closed loop and don’t use water at nearly the same rate as previous generations
Got an example? I'm pretty sure new datacenters are still using cooling towers.
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.