Relatively easy, but expensive, problem to solve. We have all the salt water you need. Build nuclear plants and desalinate.
Stop allowing them to use the Colorado River.
I’m pretty sure desalinization doesn’t scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.
it scales fine (roughly linear at large scale), people just don’t want to pay the energy cost because they think farms need cheap water.
Where would the salt go?
brine evaporation ponds
And it takes a lot of energy
which may not be an issue since companies running AI stuff are planning to deploy civilian mini nuclear reactors around the country
Loss? They consume it?
https://tube.blahaj.zone/w/qEcczobJGVGmBe2rbWJkMN
There is air cooled water chillers and water cooled water chillers. Depending on what the companies go with they could have water cooled chillers causing the water loss. Air cooled chillers don’t really have that problem because they don’t have the same cooling situation. I attached a video of a water cooled chiller
No, they don’t consume. Instead, they use it for cooling their servers. You might have heard of a way to cool a computer that is more effective than a fan called water cooling. It basically uses water to absorb the hot air from the GPU/CPU to be sent to the radiator where the water is cooled and sent back to be pumped and continue the cycle. This is called a closed-loop water cooling system. These big “AI” databases are also using water to cool the components like how they’re being used in the computer, but unlike the example, it’s not a closed-loop water cooling system, meaning that instead of the water being reused, it instead gets evaporated and participates in the water cycle. The problem with this is that water used in these open-loop systems is evaporated, meaning it is remove from the local water cycles, making fresh water less accessible in areas that already face shortages, so while the amount of fresh water on Earth stays the same, it becomes inaccessible to the people, which leads to the current situation where more than a billion people don’t have enough access to fresh water while big “AI” databases are using over 100 million liters daily. This is only one of the alarming consequences of “AI”. This however could be easily fixed by using a closed-loop water cooling systems that use renuable energy sources for the energy required to pump and cool the system. However, sadly, in our current capitalist society, the rich are too greedy and corrupt to save lives and actually help the people.
Evaporated? That would require a heat exchanger to pump heat over 100°C on the water side. That pays out?
Edit: Hey guys, is this an AI or not?
I see the confusion. In this case, evaporating doesn’t happen the natural way of boiling at 100 degrees celcius. Instead, these data centers mostly use things called cooling towers, where the warm water is sprayed into the air and some of it evaporates. It’s not technically “consumed”, because again, I emphasise that water doesn’t dissapear. It instead goes through the water cycle, but this evaporating removes water from the local supply, which can be a problem in water-scarce areas.
I don’t get this either, they just heat the water
… 71% of the earth’s surface is covered in water.
Any water a data center uses comes out the other side as… Warm water and evaporation. It’s not lost to the world or anything. It’s just moving rain elsewhere.
AI datacenters are not latency sensitive so they can easily be built in optimal energy/water locations going forward. Just regulate them like we do other industries.
Seawater cannot be used for cooling, salt buildup will kill the system. Water involved in human activity is 100% freshwater, which is the the most scarce resource as in the article (human accessible is 1% of whole water). Desallination is energy intense process too.
pretty sure technetium is more scarce
Can we stop using religious terms to describe the real world, please?
I think you’re maybe confusing scarce with sacred?
rereads the title
Yes, that would be accurate.
Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for letting me know.
It’s all good. My fiancé misreads things all the time. I’m a writer and she has dyslexia so it’s essentially a reflex of mine to help out when this happens 😂
Which one is the religious term?
The word “scarce”, when misreading it as “sacred”, when I just woke up
