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A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply (fortune.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 37 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Because that's expensive to build on this scale. They'd have to cool the water back down again.

It's cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water intothe sewer.

Which is why we need laws that go after industries that use insane amounts of water, if we don't it causes shortages and everyone's rate to go up

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.

    There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn't be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There's probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There's some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Nah, it's because of the volume.

    You don't cool down hot water with the same amount of cool water. You use a shit ton of cool water, because the larger the difference in temps the faster the heat exchange.

    So the discharge isn't water that's really hot. It's just warmer than when it went in.

    Maybe 5-10 degrees, which is enough for a negative environmental impact if constantly discharged into a lake/ocean/river, but not hot enough to be good for anything.

    They could do large underground reserve for cold water, cool their servers with it, then dump it into a second tank that eventually cools and is added to the reserve. It's not complicated, but it is a huge upfront cost.

    Companies aren't going to do it when they can pay a fraction of the cost even tho it fucks over everyone else. This is capitalism, we need regulations forcing them to do the right thing over the cheap thing.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I suppose that's very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.

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