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People should be getting priority over AI.
When the robot revolution begins, they’re going to come after you.
I live here and people are getting priority over AI?
Iowa isn’t like many states where there is water scarcity. This cooling water isn’t even being consumed. It’s used for cooling and returned to the waste water system.
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Pretty much, unfortunately.
Nobody wants to talk about all the wind energy used to run these data centers either, because that won’t generate any outrage.
We live in a society
That would be considered consumed.
Not really. At least not in the sense that it’s a net loss of water downstream.
It’s not like irrigation or bottling, where water is entirely removed from the system and not returned.
It is removed from the system. It’s not practically immediately recoverable. The capacity to supply that water has been spent.
If you want to talk about water treatment capacity, then sure. Treatment capacity is used for cooling.
That’s not what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about the mass of water being consumed (i.e., removed) from the watershed. The water removed from the river for cooling is returned. There is no net loss of water.
The water isn’t dirty. It’s warm. It would use even more energy to cool it. It’s a lose-lose.
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Warm water is the waste product because it’s easier dump the water than to cool the water. Returning the warm water to a usable state is much more expensive at scale.
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you might be right but some numbers might back up your claim. I doubt that servers could heat water as much as a nuclear reactor. datacenter coolers certainly don’t have to pressurize the water to prevent it from boiling, it doesn’t get that hot.
I feel like we’re missing the forest for the trees here, this is all in service of a feature in bing that was supposed to revolutionize search but actually caused a 0% increase in Bing’s market share from q1 to q3 https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/bings-search-market-share-fails-to-budge-despite-ai-push/
AI Tools - plural. ChatGPT (and OpenAI as a whole) predominantly runs on Azure infrastructure. Microsoft also owns GitHub with its associated copilot. And now all the Microsoft product specific copilots.
Not trying to defend their usage, but there are several forests here that are quite visible.
I’d use it all the time if it didn’t require an account.
If it’s just for cooling, wouldn’t they just be able to pull water directly from a lake and then return the same water into the lake? Why is any consumption happening?
In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.
The reason that we don’t do these things is rather mundane: it’s cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes – something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don’t think it’s a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.
A lot of problems we don’t solve boil down to “it’s boring and expensive” lol it’s sad when you think about it. Everyone says they want infrastructure investment because they think it sounds mature or whatever, but when the day comes, they shake their heads.
I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?
It probably doesn’t make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn’t needed.
Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.
Dirty water is bad for cooling equipment
Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.
Because that’s expensive to build on this scale. They’d have to cool the water back down again.
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water intothe sewer.
Which is why we need laws that go after industries that use insane amounts of water, if we don’t it causes shortages and everyone’s rate to go up
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.
There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn’t be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn’t be able to bottle and resell it.
you shouldn’t be able to bottle and resell it.
Dasani and Aquafina in shambles
Nestlé heavy breathing
We should make it exponentially more expensive the more you use.
There’s probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There’s some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.
Nah, it’s because of the volume.
You don’t cool down hot water with the same amount of cool water. You use a shit ton of cool water, because the larger the difference in temps the faster the heat exchange.
So the discharge isn’t water that’s really hot. It’s just warmer than when it went in.
Maybe 5-10 degrees, which is enough for a negative environmental impact if constantly discharged into a lake/ocean/river, but not hot enough to be good for anything.
They could do large underground reserve for cold water, cool their servers with it, then dump it into a second tank that eventually cools and is added to the reserve. It’s not complicated, but it is a huge upfront cost.
Companies aren’t going to do it when they can pay a fraction of the cost even tho it fucks over everyone else. This is capitalism, we need regulations forcing them to do the right thing over the cheap thing.
I suppose that’s very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.
Sounds like they are using evaporation cooling towers for the air chillers.
It’s evaporative cooling, big cooling towers
Power plants use lake water directly for cooling - they use a heat exchanger
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The water isn’t being consumed. It’s going through the same process all the water in the city is going through.
Pulled from the river, cleaned, used for cooling at the data centers, and returned to the river via the waste water system.
The only loss is the energy/resources to treat the water.
I gotta wonder though, water used for server cooling is basically just run through metal fixtures and returned right? Couldn’t it be possible to force some kind of maintenance and cleanliness standards onto the equipment and just have the water return to the supply? Is there any reason that water wouldn’t be just as drinkable after?
They use evaporative cooling on days where it is over 85f
Microsoft’s data centers currently use adiabatic cooling, which relies on outside air to cool down temperatures inside. It’s a system that uses less electricity than air conditioning and less water than cooling towers. But when temperatures rise above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, outside air isn’t very helpful. At that point, an evaporative cooling system kicks in, which uses water. It works like a “swamp cooler” — cooling the air by pushing it over or through water-soaked screens.
https://local.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Datacenter-water-consumption-fact-sheet.pdf
They probably treat the water to prevent mineral and bacterial build up. No matter how sanitary it is it will probably require some amount of treatment before it can be put back into public supplies.
No, but I assume you’d have to build extra infrastructure for that, which is expensive. They might now consider it worth it if they continue to need that much water, though.
if you think that’s wild, animal agriculture uses 13 TRILLION litres or gallons of water a year. Compared with fracking, which uses 220 billiion.
i don’t think that’s right. can you substantiate that?
oh, you know what? it’s actually worse. significantly worse. It’s 34-76 trillion gallons annually, https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts
Animal agriculture water consumption ranges from 34-76 trillion gallons annually. [ii] [xv]
“Summary of Estimated Water Use in the United States in 2005”. United States Geological Service
Pimentel, David, et al. “Water Resources: Agricultural and Environmental Issues”. BioScience. (2004) 54 (10): 909-918
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.
Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.”
In response to questions from The Associated Press, Microsoft said in a statement this week that it is investing in research to measure AI’s energy and carbon footprint “while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, in both training and application.”
Microsoft first said it was developing one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for OpenAI in 2020, declining to reveal its location to AP at the time but describing it as a “single system” with more than 285,000 cores of conventional semiconductors, and 10,000 graphics processors — a kind of chip that’s become crucial to AI workloads.
It wasn’t until late May that Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, disclosed that it had built its “advanced AI supercomputing data center” in Iowa, exclusively to enable OpenAI to train what has become its fourth-generation model, GPT-4.
In some ways, West Des Moines is a relatively efficient place to train a powerful AI system, especially compared to Microsoft’s data centers in Arizona that consume far more water for the same computing demand.
The original article contains 1,229 words, the summary contains 252 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
For a second, I thought that Keegan-Michael Key was gonna have to lecture someone
Rain World moment
