Ok so what you’re telling me is power plants generate electricity by burning fossil fuels which power a turbine with steam, then the data center uses all that electricity to produce even more steam?
Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?
Wxfisch@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It evaporates, that’s how it cools. The water is sprayed over a heat exchanger and gets turned to essentially steam and then new water is pumped in and thus the water is “gone”. It will fall as rain somewhere but likely not near where it was taken from.
A closed loop system could be used but they are more expensive and require more maintenance so large data centers don’t usually use them unless required to.
troybot@piefed.social 1 day ago
Railcar8095@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And all that is to… Produce steamy furry porn
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
If we’re lucky it’s furry porn. I’m more worried about the non-consensual porn of real people, including simulated CSAM.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The most funny thing is, that once trained, the model can run and make furry porn on your local machine. So they don’t even make any money on this.
Railcar8095@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I haven’t tried furry porn models in particular, but all local image generation I’ve tried locally was really bad. It was with a 3070, so nothing really meant for this.
UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.au 1 day ago
I have had news for you; it’s all steam. EVERYTHING is steam. 🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀🌚
Even you and I are just steam in liquid and solid phases.
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
You mean even my Steam games are actual steam? Neat.
UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.au 12 hours ago
They’re dispensed via valve, no?! Checkmate asteamists.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Every car in the world uses a closed loop cooling system that does not consume water.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Car cooling systems are stupidly expensive, run at temps that would damage computer CPUs, run outside, and have a really nice advantage over computers which is that at higher heat loads they also tend to go faster thus cooling them off faster.
Now imagine you redlined a dozen cars for days on end in a garage in the middle of the summer do you think you might damage some components?
It is still very possible to use closed loop cooling on data centers but any system you build needs to be able to work in summer temps which can be as high as 35-40C and needs to do that without letting the computers exceed 60C. An air cooled system to handle that much heat is going to be very expensive and use a ton of power (and power generation also uses water)
over_clox@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
While you’re effectively right in your comparison, you also must understand the difference between electronic data center cooling vs vehicle engine cooling.
Vehicle engines run best at a higher temperature range than electronics, so they install a thermostat, to literally bring the engine temperature up to a suitable range for ideal performance. But the thermostat is not necessary (unless you live near cold polar regions and want heat).
The thermostat can be safely removed from vehicles in more comfortable climates and the vehicle will run just fine, but just quite a bit cooler.
So, take the concept of a closed loop cooling system, remove the thermpstat from the equation, and you got a more viable closed loop system more suitable to keep electronics cool.
Wxfisch@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
This is comparing apples and oranges though. Automotive cooling systems are designed for a very different problem set than datacenter cooling systems. The temperature gradients are much larger in ICE systems, they need to be small, light, and portable, and they cool something that generates much more variable heat loads.
A data center creates a consistent heat load, is stationary, with access to a source of water that is functionally limitless to the operators, cools a much smaller gradient and needs to do so in the most economical way possible to be as profitable as it can be to the owners. Evaporative coolers are dead simple, very effective, and scale very easily which is why they are used.
over_clox@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
You’re almost right, but there do exist air cooled engines with no conventional radiator or water/antifreeze pump…
en.wikipedia.org/…/Volkswagen_air-cooled_engine
Many motorcycles also use air cooling.
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Some aircraft engines, too. The old single-engine Cessnas I trained on were air-cooled. Though that’s pretty easy when you’re pushing cool, atmospheric air over the engine at 100 knots.
PineRune@lemmy.world 1 day ago
more expensive
That’s the real reason right there.
over_clox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I am still learning. Thank you for your educational comment.
I loathe AI anyways, I just wanna better understand why I loathe AI…
drmoose@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
What a perfect encapsulation of AI rage hate lmao
qupada@fedia.io 1 day ago
Further to this, as well as the source of the water often being the local city's drinking water supply (as we've found this puts a strain on that supply), evaporative cooling systems concentrate the minerals / contaminants in the water, meaning a smaller (relative to what is evaporated) of now highly-concentrated runoff water also has to be constantly disposed of. This likely is also going into the city's wastewater systems.
Radiators for closed-loop systems do also occupy more space (for the same cooling capacity) versus evaporative cooling towers, and are more limited in the range of climates they can be deployed in.
On balance though, the closed-loop cooling should always be the first choice; if it works for the deployment it will never be the wrong choice on a long-term / total cost of ownership basis.
ace_garp@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This was the most comprehensive list I’ve seen about the negative aspects of LLM/datacentres use. Very informative.
lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045