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They use water for cooling, but do not consume water for cooling. Yes, they’ll use water as a heat conductor medium so it goes to where it can be cooled and sent back, but it’s a loop.
You may find the actual usage to be quite low.
they are very secretive about it, which means its probably a lot.
Interesting, what do you think they turn the water into?
maybe a lot of evaporation.
or the temperature difference might be bad in some way to the surroundings.
the secrecy is what makes me suspicious
I’m wondering if there are losses of water. Like leaks etc. If it’s a really large amount of water even a small percentage could be a lot. I’m really just spit balling here though really. I think that’s a pretty efficient use of water actually. The thermal conductivity is high compared to air and any cooling techniques which don’t include AC are surely better overall.
A water leak would either ruin the equipment if indoors or ruin the equipment if outdoors and not refilled on time. Considering those servers are their bread and butter, I’m going to assume they’re going to fix any leaks pretty quickly.
Data centers use evaporative cooling which has the water turn to steam. The steam can recondense and be sent back into the system, but a non-negligible amount is lost to the environment. This is why recently Chile partially reversed Google’s permit for a new data center