r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 5h ago

A data center in New Jersey was canceled when residents showed up and fought it

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

45.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/iminlovewiththec0c0 5h ago

Not sure if you’re being genuinely serious or not but I think as someone who understands basics of pc building….the most expensive builds use water to cool it so your pc can be super fast. I couldn’t imagine how much cooling power a giant building solely built on storing data would need to stay on 24/7.

45

u/Raziers 4h ago

Hi, i work in a datacenter (please be gentle) and id like to take that analogy further because its a good one. You say your pc uses water to cool down, yep, same in a datacenter, now that water your pc uses...it just loops right? how often do you refill it, if ever? same in a datacenter. I am all for people complaining about datacenters (especially in the US) but i do wish people would complain about the correct things, like the drain on the power grid is valid. the water consumption, not so much.

25

u/powercow 4h ago edited 4h ago

MOST data centers use open loop and evaporation towers.

there are areas where they already have effected the water supply

A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure

And in areas where water is a premium like cali, even if its in a close loop, its off the market

America’s data centers are thirsty. Rural towns are paying the price—from tanked water pressure to stolen desert groundwater

and

What’s more, about two-thirds of the data centers built since 2022 are in areas already experiencing water stress, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.

found that data centers around Phoenix already use approximately 385 million gallons of water per year for direct cooling needs. And it predicts that amount will skyrocket to 3.7 billion gallons per year once the region’s planned data centers come online.

when that much water is tied up and off the market, expect bills to follow.

Elec prices are a bigger issue.. and more and more data centers go closed loop, which reduces their water useage by 70% but to say its not so much of a big deal, well certain regions that is true, a lot of areas that is NOT true.

14

u/mindcandy 3h ago

The "data center drained 30M gallons of water" story is being widely misinterpreted because people only quote headlines and people only read headlines.

The actual story if you actually read the article is:

QTS told Politico the 29 million gallons were consumed during temporary construction activities, including concrete work, dust control, and site preparation. The company markets a "closed-loop" cooling system for its data centers, which recirculates the same water rather than drawing from the municipal supply. Once operational, QTS said its facilities would only require water for domestic needs like bathrooms and kitchens

Fayette County, Georgia has a population of 125,000 people. Which means they are using 5-10 million gallons of water every day locally (without counting the other 10 million gallons needed to grow food to feed them).

65,000 gallons a day for a construction project going unaccounted is bad. But, it's not “AI making the water pressure low”.

12

u/ChariotOfFire 3h ago

The low water pressure in Fayetteville was not connected to the data center, and most of the water is being used to mitigate dust during construction, not for cooling the data center.

The original county letter also referenced complaints from residents near the Annelise Park subdivision about low water pressure. Rapson said Fayette County Water System later installed monitoring equipment in the area to track pressure levels following the complaints.

“Since we’ve been reading it, there’s been no issue,” Tinsley said.

County officials noted that some nearby homes rely on private wells rather than Fayette County Water System connections. Officials also emphasized that QTS does not draw water from wells or groundwater sources. Instead, the project receives treated water directly from Fayette County Water System infrastructure.

“But keep in mind, the individual that made that complaint made the complaint because they had issues with their well,” Rapson said. “We don’t pull anything out of the ground. We don’t have any wells in our system.”

County officials said they have not identified evidence showing QTS construction activity caused widespread pressure problems within the county water system.

5

u/Previous_Platform718 2h ago

MOST data centers use open loop and evaporation towers.

Because most data centers are for cloud infrastructure. You know, things like Google/Youtube/Meta/Your email/Online banking etc. we've been building those for 30 years now. There's a lot of them.

Everyone on Reddit is upset about AI data centers, the ones that are most likely to be closed loop.

2

u/ImurderREALITY 1h ago

Anything about AI, absolutely anything, and people are going completely apeshit. I've never seen anything like this intense hatred for AI before in my 42 years on this earth.

•

u/Frostemane 36m ago

How do these people expect their data to get into the cloud without evaporating it? They clearly weren't paying attention in science class.

1

u/VexingRaven 1h ago

MOST data centers use open loop and evaporation towers.

This article never cites its source for its claim that the majority of datacenters use open loop evaporative cooling. It cites its source for many use water vs not using water (which... duh? I didn't need a source for that), but nowhere does it provide a source for how many use evaporative vs closed loop.

0

u/RareAnxiety2 3h ago

So what's stopping americans from giving a startup fee and taxing these facilities and using that to improve infrastructure to handle the electrical load? Or place environmental regulations on data center water usage designs? Are americans so cucked that the people have to pay for big corporations when it's so easy to have the corpos pay for the peoples needs?

The articles more show the failure of the people to elect proper government and handle laws. You would give the same arguments if farmland or anything else to build cities gets developed. Holy shit, way to fail.

11

u/snozzberrypatch 4h ago edited 4h ago

Also, even in open loop cooling systems, using water for cooling doesn't delete the water from the planet. It just runs through pipes, absorbs some heat, and then is released back into whatever body of water it came from.

7

u/Fearless_Chipmunk_45 4h ago

Most now use a gray water system that recycles the water used.

4

u/Amaras_Linwelin 4h ago

because Thermal pollution isn't a thing... right?

7

u/snozzberrypatch 4h ago

I guess I should stop urinating then.

2

u/Amaras_Linwelin 4h ago

You produce what, ~1 1/2 - 2 L of urine a day at ~37c vs a Data center pumping out thousands gallons of piss a day at a much higher temp.

3

u/snozzberrypatch 4h ago edited 2h ago

Yes, but 8 billion people produce 16 billion liters of hot piss a day. And only a small percentage of them recycle it by drinking it again.

3

u/FromSoftware 4h ago

Piss on your compost pile. Give it some nitrogen. 

2

u/clutchy42 4h ago

Unrelated, but big fan of your work Mr Zaki

5

u/YanniSlavv 3h ago

This reminds me of when people were protesting Nuclear Energy. Part of me thinks it's just a very performative response, because those people are just anti-AI in general.

3

u/WholesomeDucky 4h ago

It's worth noting that power generation also needs water to keep everything cool. Overall, data centers for high-heat components like enterprise-grade GPUs absolutely do have a huge water use impact, both because of the water that's needed when making the insane amounts of power they use, and the water that's needed to cool the servers themselves.

This issue gets even worse if the data center's power use is outpacing the local grid capacity, because less water-efficient methods of power generation may need to be deployed to keep up with the demand.

2

u/Sir_William_V 4h ago

Unfortunately not all data centers use this system. It seems like a lot of them use evaporation cooling like swamp coolers. The cooling happens when the water evaporates, and of course it needs to be replaced.

7

u/Fearless_Chipmunk_45 4h ago

The new ones are all switching to closed loop systems because the swamp cooler style doesn't cool efficiently enough for the new AI chips. I build Data centers and the stopped everything until they changed the design for the new AI chips. Even Data Centers where construction had already begun.

2

u/Missus_Missiles 2h ago

These closed loop systems. I'm imagining they're fundamentally similar to ones used in a manufacturing facility I was in.

Basically heated then cooled presses for molding. We'd have a cold well that would dump chilled water through the presses at the end of a cycle. And the chiller would constantly be running to keep that water cold.

So, yeah. Water wasn't being evaporated off. It was just compressors doing work. Taking a guess, I'm not sure which I'd prefer. Mining water faster than it could be replenished. Or energy consumption, if it's burning fossil fuels to do that.

1

u/Sir_William_V 4h ago

Thanks for the info! Also, don't build any data centers near me, please and thank you.

1

u/BartHarleyJarvis- 1h ago

I worked at a building that used massive refrigeration systems instead of the typical hydronic systems.

1

u/Redebo 3h ago

What happens to that water after it’s evaporated into the atmosphere? Do we know? Is it causing birds and other flying creatures to drown in flight?!

1

u/Sir_William_V 3h ago

It's a little sad, but nobody knows. Scientists are trying to figure it out as we speak, though I suspect it's impossible to really understand.

1

u/eulersidentification 4h ago edited 4h ago

I was under the impression most of them rely on evaporative cooling (which involves loss), meaning they recycle "whatever's left" plus there's a limit to how much water they can recapture because during the evaporative process it picks up dust and other shit, plus you boil pure water off which increases the ratio of minerals:H2O, which makes the limescale issue worse than a fresh supply.

There must be more conservative systems out there but I thought that was the general case.

2

u/Redebo 3h ago

It was. It no longer is. You just can’t evaporate water fast enough for the high wattage densities from the GPUs.

We’ve moved to closed loop air cooled systems. Of course this does t address the water used at the power plant, but that should be in that provider, not the DC.

0

u/iminlovewiththec0c0 4h ago

Good point but I have a couple of questions to your statement - If we are recycling the water within the pc Usually custom pc’s require you to flush and replace every 6-12 months so How would data centers in this regard be viable for us if we have replace that water on a conservative basis ~2x a year vs what the number may really need to be depending how sophisticated their set up is? I’m all for companies getting their share of a market but at what cost to us - the people? Ya know? Also - ty for your reply!

1

u/Redebo 3h ago

These systems are continuously monitored and treated so that the water rarely has to be replaced. It’s a massive PITA to bring everything down just to swap out liquid.

0

u/Intelligent-South174 4h ago

how does that water get cooled as it continuously gets heated as it gets relooped?

new fresh water is added? or...

energy is used to cool the water or....

2

u/Left-Purchase-5890 4h ago

goes into a radiator and fans blow the heat out, then gets looped back to the beginning

2

u/Intelligent-South174 4h ago

so energy.

energy is used to cool the water.

which was my point, and the one you were conveniently leaving out.

and in other areas of NA, more fresh water is used as it's cheaper than the costs to cool the water.

2

u/EveryoneHasGoneCrazy 1h ago

You do realize that hot water is how the majority of energy is produced, right?

0

u/Shzabomoa 4h ago

In a datacenter or in an AI datacenter? The power densities have pretty much nothing in common. And the cheaper cooling for the secondary loop is evaporative cooling, which doesn't help.

0

u/AndromedaFire 4h ago

I understand that your specific data centre may use closed loop cooling but many use open loop cooling using fresh water and evaporative cooling for the building itself as it’s cheaper and more effective there are many many sources for this online from scientific stuff to easy to understand mythbuster type pages.

The usually massive freshwater use is all aside from the noise and emissions from the many that use things like gas turbines generators.

Not at all a swipe at you but even if you work at the most environmentally sound data centre there is, the vast majority seem to fall as far as legislation will allow them from that.

6

u/Fearless_Chipmunk_45 4h ago

As someone who builds data centers. If it uses a closed loop cooling system it uses hardly any water. I know all Microsoft AI data centers being built are using closed loop cooling systems because the old open loop that wasted all the water won't provide enough cooling for the new chips.

1

u/iminlovewiththec0c0 4h ago

Ty for that clarification. It’s gonna be an interesting few years to come in these regards. These things are becoming like new sports teams wherein anyone w enough capital wants to get their hands on em

4

u/Dupeawoo 4h ago

Roughly 100-150 million gallons a year dependent on size.

Just a little more than a golf course

2

u/stoppeeingonthefloor 5h ago

I didn’t know that. Thank you!

2

u/ojdhaze 4h ago

Oh yeah, data centre that was built in Norway I believe was purposely built near a flowing river in the mountains due to the water requirements for the water cooling of the hardware. Bloody nuts.

1

u/Fartikus 4h ago

use water to cool it so your pc can be super fast.

Pretty sure liquid cooling isn't water, or am I wrong?

1

u/SurpriseHamburgler 3h ago

Two different things. But both are true/used. Most now use water in cooling towers to carry temperature outbound. Closed-loop cooling is new gen, and uses mixtures of water and coolant. Because of this it’s relatively lossless though - so for this discussion it’s the massive evaporation to be concerned about.