Because it is cheap and government pay for infrastructure and maintenance. If these company would have to pay for the public goods they use none would be profitable.
The problem is they are heavily subsidised currently so they don’t actually care about using the cheaper more environmentally friendly solution. The easiest solution is to just hook the mains water supply into the cooling pumps and have the output go down a drain. The fact that it costs 100 bajillion quid a minute, they don’t care about because they don’t pay that.
Better solutions have always and will always exist, but they cost more to implement.
Piping grey water to a data center either means placing it somewhere with an appropriate pipe with appropriate filtration performed, or building a new pipe/filtration. Drinking water in comparison is easily accessible anywhere. They don’t care about the impact or even the per unit cost, they just want to build on the cheap and take advantage of local infrastructure, and they figure in this ai boom the actual running costs are irrelevant because ai companies will pay for anything that works, efficiency be damned
I sold glycol and grey water data centers 20 yrs ago. Can someone eli5 why water is the crux of the consumption?
Because it is cheap and government pay for infrastructure and maintenance. If these company would have to pay for the public goods they use none would be profitable.
Isn’t grey water cheaper?
The problem is they are heavily subsidised currently so they don’t actually care about using the cheaper more environmentally friendly solution. The easiest solution is to just hook the mains water supply into the cooling pumps and have the output go down a drain. The fact that it costs 100 bajillion quid a minute, they don’t care about because they don’t pay that.
I don’t know the deals they made. I dunno k if the Greg water network is every where.
Better solutions have always and will always exist, but they cost more to implement.
Piping grey water to a data center either means placing it somewhere with an appropriate pipe with appropriate filtration performed, or building a new pipe/filtration. Drinking water in comparison is easily accessible anywhere. They don’t care about the impact or even the per unit cost, they just want to build on the cheap and take advantage of local infrastructure, and they figure in this ai boom the actual running costs are irrelevant because ai companies will pay for anything that works, efficiency be damned