Data centers, whose expansion is being fueled dramatically by the artificial intelligence boom, have a far bigger carbon footprint than previously estimated, according to a new study. The sprawling, power-hungry sites, used to store critical IT infrastructure like servers, are being built worldwide by companies and countries as AI applications…
  • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    That’s not what they’re doing though. That would be fine that’s just a heat exchanger.

    What they are doing is pulling water from the mains to cool the system either directly or to cool an internal system via heat exchanger and then are dumping hot water back into the environment. They’re not pumping the water to cooling ponds and letting it cool back down and then pulling the water back out of the cooling ponds to use again.

    • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I was thinking more along the lines of the big evaporative cooling towers you see with a lot of reactors, since they rely on vaporisation to cool off, most of that water can’t be reused, short of getting picked up in the water cycle again.