Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
So is air cooling actually feasible but we don’t do it cause it would make data centers look like nuclear reactors? Or is it just not feasible?
Air cooling is feasible, as evidenced by existing power stations that use air cooling. A lot of newer nuclear generation use water cooling, being sited along the ocean and in the multi gigawatt range. But we can also find examples of inland power stations that have no water connection, and therefore need some massive cooling towers. Here is one in Germany that has a 2.2 GW rating and a 200 meter tall tower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
This is, as you can imagine, rather expensive to build, but it’s doable. Cooling a coal fire is not substantially different than cooling compute loads in a data center, as it’s all just a matter of moving heat around. Will there be differences due to the base temperature of coal versus GPUs? Yes, since the ratio of input to ambient temperature matters. But on the flip side, this should make it easier to construct, as the plumbing for lower temperatures is simpler.
Mechanical engineers can chime in on feasibility for AI data centers, but seeing as it hasn’t been done, it’s probably still cost related.
AFAIK it’s feasible for most data centers except the where power density is so huge that you just can’t do it with air cooling. That issue is most common for large scale AI data centers.
Modern CPU consumes ~150W, modern AI chip can eat 700W and they’re packed as densely as possible with multiple cards slotted in every motherboard.