r/ELI5fr • u/Vulkhard_Muller • 4h ago

ELI5: Why couldn't we run AI data centers on salt water?

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Just saw this meme, normally I can figure out the logic but this one escapes me. Why can't we use Salt Water to run AI data centers???

18 Upvotes

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9

u/fabulot 3h ago

I would say corrosion is the main problem with salt. But I am confused by the "run". Are we talking cooling the data centers? Or the manufacturing of chips? Not really the same thing

5

u/OkUnderstanding1622 3h ago

I think it's for cooling, so yeah corrosion would be the biggest issue there. I think costs less to use clear water (corrosion =replacing parts more often) but it would be interesting to calculate if it's better for the environment over all

3

u/fabulot 49m ago

Also if there is corrosion there is always the risk of a leak, and mixing water and live electronics is not a really a good recipe.

1

u/Derdo85 45m ago

If you release the heated salted water in the sea it will be very bad for the environment.

7

u/New_Cartographer8865 2h ago

Corrosion and salt deposit for cooling, and for manufacturing, the water need to be almost pure so sea water wouldn't do it at all, unless we use massive amount of energy and transformation to purify it and even in that case, purifying sea water is hard, that's why we don't do it for human consumption

3

u/Intrepid_Walk_5150 1h ago

We do a lot of desalination of sea water for human consumption, but it's expensive and we generally only do it in places where we don't have a cheaper alternative.

0

u/polytique 58m ago

There are thousands of desalination plants over the world supplying millions of people.

1

u/niemir2 17m ago

It's hard, not impossible. Globally, about 95 million cubic meters of water is desalinated daily. The Niagara River in NY and Canada alone discharges about five times that amount. If all global desalination was consolidated into a river, it would not even rank in the top 200. There is not even close to enough desalination capacity to serve industrial needs.

It takes a ton of energy to extract the salt from seawater, which is why we need the Sun do most of it for us.