Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.

However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

View on HN

With regards to evaporative cooled DCs (either primarily cooled that way or assisted some of the time): Imagine an air conditioner that instead of requiring energy to drive the compressor to make the phase change work, all the phase change was provided by taking in liquid water and evaporating it off as vapor, taking the latent heat of vaporization (2257 kJ/kg or 970 BTU/lb) with it.

The article links to a report from the library of congress, from which it gets it's numbers. The congressional report is quite informative, and and non-partisan.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057

People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient.

Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.

It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.

I don't even know who owns forgeeks.net. They're only a couple months old and is disseminated by a new HN account. Some of the "author" social media links appear AI generated.

Red flags galore. Wouldn't surprise me if it was bankrolled by bad actors and/or a website created/operated by AI agents.

They use closed loop systems. That reduces the water consumption on-site, but you still need to move the energy out of the DC, which requires a lot of energy. That extra energy itself is likely produced by upstream power plants evaporating water. In practice you mostly move the consumption upstream.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com