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The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.

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How is it a minor ingredient if the data center will not work without it? No datacenter can operate normally without a cooling system.

A cooling system can operate without water.

This would require a much larger area, because servers could not be mounted so densely. Air cooling can't achieve the same amount of heat transferred per unit volume as water cooling. Water has uniquely high specific heat.

Data center water consumption isn't due to it's use as a heat transfer medium, it's due to the evaporative cooling which cashes in water's enthalpy of vaporization.

Thr alternative would be to use a heat pump and spend electricity to cool the water that cools the servers.

Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option.

OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :(

[1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic...

[2]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/DLC-Rack

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