4 ms·

Meta announces new data centers

31 points by ksec 1y ago

ksec 1y ago
If the water is only used for cooling then it should be a closed loop system and doesn't "used up" any water? Unless Data Center uses water in a way we dont know?
- asib 1y ago
  Hmm bit of googling indicates one example: at least some data centers use cooling towers which dissipate heat via evaporation, i.e. loss of some water from the system. I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.
- devmor 1y ago
  Some types of industrial cooling pull fresh water in and dump heated water back out as waste water. I don't know how Meta's datacenters are cooled, but such a thing does exist. Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.
  - haiku2077 1y ago
    Sometimes the heated water is useful. I worked at a campus in a cold region where our on site DC's heated water was used to heat the floors.
    - devmor 1y ago
      Linus of LTT/LMG has a tiny version of this kind of thing at his home where the water cooling loop for servers in his basement ultimately heat his in-ground swimming pool.
  - cbm-vic-20 1y ago
    I've not "done the math", but venting slightly warmer water vapor from a tower seems less ecologically damaging than releasing warm water back into an ecosystem that can't handle it, by diluting the waste energy over a wider area. In the end it's about energy dissipation; that heat's got to go somewhere, and there's only so much you can recapture with cogeneration.
    - toast0 1y ago
      Drawing on ground water and releasing it into the atmosphere isn't great if the demand exceeds the aquifer's ability to recharge. Discharging heated water into a retention pond might allow it to recharge the aquifer (although some would evaporate), and form a less open loop. Or, discharging it into sewers might offset fresh water needs at a downstream treatment plant, and the temperature differential may or may not be important. Sometimes, reclaimed water from treatment plants can be used for cooling as well, and that's better than pulling fresh water directly.
- surge 1y ago
  Engadget often has sensationalist, inaccurate headlines. I stopped reading them when I was intimately with the actual details of an article vs the way they framed/presented it. Also, what kind of water? Pure clean water, untreated water, Grey water, etc? Bottled water and other industries consume millions of gallons too. If its for cooling, I imagine water can be used that isn't being used for any other purpose. At least the water cycle is a thing, the alternative is A/C cooling which would be even more harmful. This is one of those cases where even if a company picks the least bad option, they're going to get criticized because negative agitating headlines get clicks. A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    Do some research, there's lots of info online. Water use for example: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
    - surge 1y ago
      It didn't specify if fresh water meant non-salt water from a natural water source, or treated drinkable water. I'd need to see the rainfall averages for the region the data center is in, susceptibility to drought to know how much of a problem this actually is. Data center locations are often chosen based on cooling costs, availability of greener electricity, water, etc. This blanket statement, "only 3% of the world is fresh water" is pointless and alarmist language because a good portion of the world is desert or arid. Some places have very little water, others have an over-abundance, and location matters. Most of the water problems regarding access to clean water and access to drinkable water have more to do with over populating a region because of the nice weather (LA, CA for example) beyond what is sustainable or practical. Putting a data center in Illinois or something has very little do to with the problems of access to water in southern CA, where movies like Chinatown as far back as the 70s depicts the problem of access to water being a huge problem because it gets little rainfall being close to the desert and isn't a good place to put a large populace and not have that problem. If they're building the data center in the desert or a drought susceptible region, where fresh water usage is way past its limits, fine, but if the data center is in the Upper Midwest or parts of the Pacific NW, the consumption of water there isn't going to have any impact on the areas that have a consumption issue.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... > Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people. Doesn't seem to be a closed system.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    I guess this statement is technically correct, since a data center that needs a net of 5 million gallons of water per day would indeed be large, but I wonder if there are any such data centers in reality. None of the data center sites, which are agglomerations of data centers, rather than individual data centers, in Google's 2025 environmental report use that much. Google's worldwide footprint is a net 22 million gallons per day, and their largest complex of data centers in or near Council Bluffs, Iowa, uses less than 3 million gallons per day. So this supposed "large data center" would be something like 10x as large as any Google data center?
  - tacticalturtle 1y ago
    That article has been posted several times in this thread. But that article lists out several solutions for using water cooling - one of which is evaporative. And another mentioned is closed loop. How do we know which solution Meta is using here?
  - rixed 1y ago
    Cooling towers can take water from a stream for instance, and return it mostly to that stream (just a few °C hotter). The quantity of water that is lost to the atmosphere is quite small. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower it's less than 1% of the circulating water. At first approximation, water "lost" to cool down industrial installation seems not a concern at all compared to water lost to grow corn to feed cows for human consumption.
- lxgr 1y ago
  It's also used for humidification to avoid static discharges, apparently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  most don't use closed loop
leakycap 1y ago
Who "gobbles" water? What a weird title by the site. > Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. Then they go on to say guzzling. Really personifying the monster. First, it's bigger than Manhattan... then it's gobbling and guzzling. I wonder if the author or any people reviewing the piece 'fed' it into a 'starving' LLM?
- GlacierFox 1y ago
  Mark?
  - khurs 1y ago
    Yeah Mark. Robotic Alien Lizard types gobble water. Everyone knows that.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries. If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.
  - unethical_ban 1y ago
    If it's impacting water availability to residents, it's a problem, full stop.
    - jeffbee 1y ago
      If you actually read the original article, the well of the complaining person was destroyed by vibrations from construction, not from overdraft if the aquifer.
      - unethical_ban 1y ago
throwoutway 1y ago
If only shareholders had the proper shares to vote against this dilettante. Looking forward to reading "The rise and fall of Zuck"
- mrits 1y ago
  I prefer to focus my activism toward the companies of the shares I don't hold
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    this is why the world never gets better
    - mrits 1y ago
      I suppose it is somewhat subjective but it seems to be the world has always been getting better when you zoom out a bit
- khurs 1y ago
  Shareholder, not shareholders. The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.
barbazoo 1y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44566201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44566201 > The Ohio Prometheus development will use gas turbines and is based on a new data center design focused on speed to deployment So it takes away water from people and pollutes the environment. Got it. AI is great!
slt2021 1y ago
We really need to find a better use of heat generated by data centers. Is there a way to harness exhaust heat to generate electricity ? or for other industrial use case, for example light manufacturing, textile, pulp & paper ? Is it possible to harness heat to boil water and like generate electricity ?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Have you considered the trillions of gallons of water which get heated every day by the sun and then all that heat evaporates in the night?
  - timeon 1y ago
    Do those trillions of gallons of water require generated energy for water treatment?
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      What does it matter? Angry hackers are down voting my comment because somehow human endeavors have to be energy effective, but nature hasn't?
- lxgr 1y ago
  The main problem is that the temperature difference isn't high enough to do a lot of useful things with the waste heat from data centers. Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground. Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter. [1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.
pascoej 1y ago
Maybe district heating will start make sense, even given the low efficiency due to low temperature gradient.
snowwrestler 1y ago
> There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years. This is a real issue that could get much worse. Data centers do open-loop cooling systems because water is cheap… to them. The market reaction would be to raise water prices until it is “worth it” for data centers to invest in closed-loop, low-loss cooling systems. However they have WAY more purchasing power than local residents. So long before the market solution can kick in, social unrest will show up. In the U.S. we just had a massive cultural shift over ~9% increase in food costs. Imagine how things will go when water starts getting too expensive. And BTW potable water availability is decreasing globally due to global warming. > Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage. > “What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
- RRL 1y ago
  We largely stopped growing avocados in the US when water rates went up. With the increased rates, and NAFTA, US avocado ranchers could not compete. There is speculation that Mexican cartels own/operate much of the Mexican avocado industry that we rely on. I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.
  - karmakurtisaani 1y ago
    I think the problems with desalination are the cost (facilities, energy) and the leftover brine, which is damaging to the environment wherever it's dumped. It has its uses, of course, but not without drawbacks.
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
      I've never fully understood this, shouldn't the brine be mixed in with wastewater? It's all a net-zero system, it's not like water is leaving the system. The rest is just infrastructure (which is mostly political will).
red-iron-pine 1y ago
what's that meme... "AI uses more power than Bolivia to help some 900/hr consultant poorly craft a painfully generic slide deck to a manager who outsourced most of his primary job functions to the Big4."
tmaly 1y ago
what actually happens with the water used by these data centers? Is it just turned to steam? Does the water get polluted?

31 points by ksec 1y ago

ksec 1y ago

If the water is only used for cooling then it should be a closed loop system and doesn't "used up" any water? Unless Data Center uses water in a way we dont know?

asib 1y ago
Hmm bit of googling indicates one example: at least some data centers use cooling towers which dissipate heat via evaporation, i.e. loss of some water from the system. I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.
devmor 1y ago
Some types of industrial cooling pull fresh water in and dump heated water back out as waste water. I don't know how Meta's datacenters are cooled, but such a thing does exist. Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.
- haiku2077 1y ago
  Sometimes the heated water is useful. I worked at a campus in a cold region where our on site DC's heated water was used to heat the floors.
  - devmor 1y ago
    Linus of LTT/LMG has a tiny version of this kind of thing at his home where the water cooling loop for servers in his basement ultimately heat his in-ground swimming pool.
- cbm-vic-20 1y ago
  I've not "done the math", but venting slightly warmer water vapor from a tower seems less ecologically damaging than releasing warm water back into an ecosystem that can't handle it, by diluting the waste energy over a wider area. In the end it's about energy dissipation; that heat's got to go somewhere, and there's only so much you can recapture with cogeneration.
  - toast0 1y ago
    Drawing on ground water and releasing it into the atmosphere isn't great if the demand exceeds the aquifer's ability to recharge. Discharging heated water into a retention pond might allow it to recharge the aquifer (although some would evaporate), and form a less open loop. Or, discharging it into sewers might offset fresh water needs at a downstream treatment plant, and the temperature differential may or may not be important. Sometimes, reclaimed water from treatment plants can be used for cooling as well, and that's better than pulling fresh water directly.
surge 1y ago
Engadget often has sensationalist, inaccurate headlines. I stopped reading them when I was intimately with the actual details of an article vs the way they framed/presented it. Also, what kind of water? Pure clean water, untreated water, Grey water, etc? Bottled water and other industries consume millions of gallons too. If its for cooling, I imagine water can be used that isn't being used for any other purpose. At least the water cycle is a thing, the alternative is A/C cooling which would be even more harmful. This is one of those cases where even if a company picks the least bad option, they're going to get criticized because negative agitating headlines get clicks. A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Do some research, there's lots of info online. Water use for example: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
  - surge 1y ago
    It didn't specify if fresh water meant non-salt water from a natural water source, or treated drinkable water. I'd need to see the rainfall averages for the region the data center is in, susceptibility to drought to know how much of a problem this actually is. Data center locations are often chosen based on cooling costs, availability of greener electricity, water, etc. This blanket statement, "only 3% of the world is fresh water" is pointless and alarmist language because a good portion of the world is desert or arid. Some places have very little water, others have an over-abundance, and location matters. Most of the water problems regarding access to clean water and access to drinkable water have more to do with over populating a region because of the nice weather (LA, CA for example) beyond what is sustainable or practical. Putting a data center in Illinois or something has very little do to with the problems of access to water in southern CA, where movies like Chinatown as far back as the 70s depicts the problem of access to water being a huge problem because it gets little rainfall being close to the desert and isn't a good place to put a large populace and not have that problem. If they're building the data center in the desert or a drought susceptible region, where fresh water usage is way past its limits, fine, but if the data center is in the Upper Midwest or parts of the Pacific NW, the consumption of water there isn't going to have any impact on the areas that have a consumption issue.
barbazoo 1y ago
From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... > Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people. Doesn't seem to be a closed system.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  I guess this statement is technically correct, since a data center that needs a net of 5 million gallons of water per day would indeed be large, but I wonder if there are any such data centers in reality. None of the data center sites, which are agglomerations of data centers, rather than individual data centers, in Google's 2025 environmental report use that much. Google's worldwide footprint is a net 22 million gallons per day, and their largest complex of data centers in or near Council Bluffs, Iowa, uses less than 3 million gallons per day. So this supposed "large data center" would be something like 10x as large as any Google data center?
- tacticalturtle 1y ago
  That article has been posted several times in this thread. But that article lists out several solutions for using water cooling - one of which is evaporative. And another mentioned is closed loop. How do we know which solution Meta is using here?
- rixed 1y ago
  Cooling towers can take water from a stream for instance, and return it mostly to that stream (just a few °C hotter). The quantity of water that is lost to the atmosphere is quite small. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower it's less than 1% of the circulating water. At first approximation, water "lost" to cool down industrial installation seems not a concern at all compared to water lost to grow corn to feed cows for human consumption.
lxgr 1y ago
It's also used for humidification to avoid static discharges, apparently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/ Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.
red-iron-pine 1y ago
most don't use closed loop

leakycap 1y ago

Who "gobbles" water? What a weird title by the site. > Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. Then they go on to say guzzling. Really personifying the monster. First, it's bigger than Manhattan... then it's gobbling and guzzling. I wonder if the author or any people reviewing the piece 'fed' it into a 'starving' LLM?

GlacierFox 1y ago
Mark?
- khurs 1y ago
  Yeah Mark. Robotic Alien Lizard types gobble water. Everyone knows that.
jeffbee 1y ago
500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries. If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  If it's impacting water availability to residents, it's a problem, full stop.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    If you actually read the original article, the well of the complaining person was destroyed by vibrations from construction, not from overdraft if the aquifer.
    - unethical_ban 1y ago

throwoutway 1y ago

If only shareholders had the proper shares to vote against this dilettante. Looking forward to reading "The rise and fall of Zuck"

mrits 1y ago
I prefer to focus my activism toward the companies of the shares I don't hold
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  this is why the world never gets better
  - mrits 1y ago
    I suppose it is somewhat subjective but it seems to be the world has always been getting better when you zoom out a bit
khurs 1y ago
Shareholder, not shareholders. The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.

barbazoo 1y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44566201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44566201 > The Ohio Prometheus development will use gas turbines and is based on a new data center design focused on speed to deployment So it takes away water from people and pollutes the environment. Got it. AI is great!

slt2021 1y ago

We really need to find a better use of heat generated by data centers. Is there a way to harness exhaust heat to generate electricity ? or for other industrial use case, for example light manufacturing, textile, pulp & paper ? Is it possible to harness heat to boil water and like generate electricity ?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
carlosjobim 1y ago
Have you considered the trillions of gallons of water which get heated every day by the sun and then all that heat evaporates in the night?
- timeon 1y ago
  Do those trillions of gallons of water require generated energy for water treatment?
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    What does it matter? Angry hackers are down voting my comment because somehow human endeavors have to be energy effective, but nature hasn't?
lxgr 1y ago
The main problem is that the temperature difference isn't high enough to do a lot of useful things with the waste heat from data centers. Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground. Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter. [1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.

pascoej 1y ago

Maybe district heating will start make sense, even given the low efficiency due to low temperature gradient.

snowwrestler 1y ago

> There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years. This is a real issue that could get much worse. Data centers do open-loop cooling systems because water is cheap… to them. The market reaction would be to raise water prices until it is “worth it” for data centers to invest in closed-loop, low-loss cooling systems. However they have WAY more purchasing power than local residents. So long before the market solution can kick in, social unrest will show up. In the U.S. we just had a massive cultural shift over ~9% increase in food costs. Imagine how things will go when water starts getting too expensive. And BTW potable water availability is decreasing globally due to global warming. > Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage. > “What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”

RRL 1y ago
We largely stopped growing avocados in the US when water rates went up. With the increased rates, and NAFTA, US avocado ranchers could not compete. There is speculation that Mexican cartels own/operate much of the Mexican avocado industry that we rely on. I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.
- karmakurtisaani 1y ago
  I think the problems with desalination are the cost (facilities, energy) and the leftover brine, which is damaging to the environment wherever it's dumped. It has its uses, of course, but not without drawbacks.
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    I've never fully understood this, shouldn't the brine be mixed in with wastewater? It's all a net-zero system, it's not like water is leaving the system. The rest is just infrastructure (which is mostly political will).

red-iron-pine 1y ago

what's that meme... "AI uses more power than Bolivia to help some 900/hr consultant poorly craft a painfully generic slide deck to a manager who outsourced most of his primary job functions to the Big4."

tmaly 1y ago

what actually happens with the water used by these data centers? Is it just turned to steam? Does the water get polluted?