I don’t understand why the Microsoft water story keeps getting posted over and over again. Yes, their data centers use a relatively large amount of water if ambient temperatures reach 30°C, but the total water usage wasn’t even that bad.
Microsoft took up 6% of the water capacity for a city of 68 thousand. That’s not some kind of hose intended to drain the river. 40% of water demand in the region us used for lawn irrigation, it’s not like children are dying of drought because of ChatGPT.
Conceptually, using this much water is dubious. If you want to change things, don’t look at Microsoft, be mad at the public utilities selling that much water to a data center. Vote for local government officials that won’t let them construct a data center in the middle of a state often hit by droughts. Take the 30ms latency hit and only constructed data centers along the coast, and maybe along big lakes.
I’m actually curious on the water usage. How is it being utilized that it is completely removed from circulation? Or is it simply being used, dumped into the cities return, and used again?
Because water running through a datacenter… sounds like perfectly drinkable water. Maybe a little warm?
In every water cooling loop for consumer grade computing hardware, the water is cycled through for hundreds (thousands?) of hours before servicing is needed. I think it would be pretty easy for a company with such massive resources to have some sort of small on site water treatment facility or filtration system. Swimming pools filter their water, why can’t data centers?
I don’t think the water would be potable after running through that sort of hardware because the piping is probably not safe for transporting drinking water, especially at high temperatures when different chemicals could leech into the water. There’s also fittings, lubricants, anti-microbial additives, etc. that would further complicate things.
Doubtful that this is using traditional per-device water cooling. I’m betting that this is traditional hot row/cold row cooling and there is an evaporative component of the HVAC coolant loop to reduce the power requirements of the system as a whole.
Lemmy loves to shit on MS but they are constantly innovating in efficient data centers because spending less to operate directly reduces their expenditures, which directly equals profit on a service with fixed costs and multi-year reservations like Azure.
You can bet that if the solution was as simple as what you suggest that they would have been doing it for years, but the thermal considerations for one machine and the thermal considerations for 100,000 machines are not the same. The #1 priority to operate that many systems is to use as little power as possible because power is not only the biggest expense but also the primary limiting factor on the total number of systems you can host.
How about both? During a long drought why shouldn’t people be mad at a multinational company sucking up water to use for their international tech products?
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6% of the water is effectively being used by billions of people. That’s pretty efficient versus keeping lawns greener for a few thousand people who insist on using non-native plants for landscaping.
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I’m saying that 6% isn’t a lot considering the number of people effectively using that water.
It’s like when people moan about California having to pipe in water for its agriculture without considering how many people outside of California are eating that food.
I’m confused, why would they consume water? Why wouldn’t they water cool with a closed loop system, or, better yet, a system that draws water from these rivers, and dumps the warm water back in?
Dumping warm water back into these systems usually is even worse as it can cause a host of issues for wildlife. A closed loop system should definitely be used though.
