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They definitely don't. The water consumption of AI is not happening in the cooling blocks in the racks, it's happening outside in cooling towers. The heat a dat
by sniffers 1y ago
They definitely don't. The water consumption of AI is not happening in the cooling blocks in the racks, it's happening outside in cooling towers. The heat a data center produces must be removed from the data center, and that is typically done via evaporation. The hot water interfaces with evaporative cooling towers and moves back inside to cool the chips again.
It would be neat if we could harvest that heat and use it for some purpose, but today we largely use it to make steam.
- owenversteeg 1y agoThe issue with harvesting the waste heat is the temperature of it (low.) I commented about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007358
- sniffers 1y agoTotally. I'm imagining something like heating for residential or greenhouses. Or a preheated input to some other heating process. One could presumably also spend energy to concentrate it a bit, but it's never going to turn turbines. Still, the mind wonders -- here's a pocket of relatively warm, surely we could do something with that waste?
- matt-p 1y agoIt can be done without water it's just marginally more energy intensive. Traditional dry coolers are perfect for these temps.