I definitely agree that if the logistics don't make any sense then you shouldn't build them there.

~Side note: this is also why I think Florida, Nevada, and Arizona shouldn't have hockey teams. It's an affront to nature.~

As much as I am the Florida and Vegas hater that I am when it comes to hockey, the seasons are played so late into spring these days almost every team but Winnipeg is going to be affronting nature. Ill give you that florida humidity and heat must really be the worst of the worst though.

All water is drinking water if you're brave enough

It takes more work to avoid salt buildup, but you can evaporate saltwater as a place to dump heat, and we aren't gonna run out of saltwater any time soon. 'Course, only so many places have saltwater access.

EDIT: You evaporate enough water for cooling, you can increase rainfall somewhat in the local area, which boosts crop growth measurably. I remember reading an article about nuclear power plants that use evaporative cooling producing that effect.

kagis

Effect of Nuclear Power Plants on Local Crop Yields | Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics | Cambridge Core

Effect of Nuclear Power Plants on Local Crop Yields - Volume 54 Issue 1

Cambridge Core (www.cambridge.org)

The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent.

What do datacenters need large volumes of running water for? Can they not do a continuous loop? It's for cooling computers, right? That can't be done with a closed loop of water?

The problem with using salt water isn't salt buildup, it's that it's corrosive and will drastically shorten the lifespan of any equipment exposed to it.

You don't pipe salt water through the data center. You have a heat exchanger that touches the salt water.

Also, good luck sourcing salt water in Illinois.

A closed loop just moves away the heat, you still need to cool the water, else it keeps rising in temperature until it doesn't cool enough. On desktops this can be achieved with fans, which isn't surprising as waterless setups of fans can already cool down most desktop CPUs.
On a data center (and power plants), this is not feasible as they generate too much heat. They would need massive fans and would raise the air temperature like crazy.

My next thought would be to find a use for the heat; colocate the data center with some other facility that needs massive quantities of heat. I remember something about a spa that heated its pools with computers (I think mining bitcoin, but still). I've also been curious if heat pumps could get hot enough to bake bread at industrial scales. Pump heat out of a data center and into a bigass bread oven?

How about reducing our dependence on data centres by using software that is more peer to peer and local first etc?

Of course some data centres have legitimate use cases, such as big data analysis on weather and climate data etc, but building huge data centres for social media and running everything in the cloud is silly from an environmental perspective

There have been houses that are warmed with data center heat

No, we need massive data centers for LLMs and data analysis for targeted ads /s

Sorry to say but this is just one aspect of dropping out of all climate contracts national, international and global. And yes, AI is making this much worse.

“Hyperscale data centers are the really large data centers that are being built now for [generative] AI, which is really driving a lot of the growth in this sector because it requires vast data processing capabilities,” said Volzer. “The trend is larger and bigger centers to feed this demand for AI.”

Much of the water used in data centers never gets back into the watershed, particularly if the data center uses a method called evaporative cooling.

Think about that the next time you "ask ChatGPT" something.

Just one more reason not to use servers located in the USA for anything.

Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn't be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Of course that isn't to say that we shouldn't be thinking about whether we're using software efficiently and for good reasons. Plenty of computations that take place in datacenters serve to make a company money but don't actually make anyone's lives better.

Hmm. If a city had some system of central heating, would a data center's waste heat be used during winter months? I've heard of projects to use abandoned mines flooded with water as a sort of thermal battery, could that also be a solution?

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Yes, this would be the ideal for dealing with that issue. Re-use that heat to generate some of the energy the data center is demanding.

Imagine there’s an engineering & physics issue to be solved. But where would we find those top talent people to solve it?

big farmer wouldn't like this, and big farmer gives America the corn syrup it needs to survive

then don't build anything in illinoisi