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Virginia's Datacenters Guzzle Water Like There's No Tomorrow, Says FOI-based Report (theregister.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Concerns over the environmental impact of datacenters in the US state of Virginia are being raised again amid claims their water consumption has stepped up by almost two-thirds since 2019, and AI could make it worse. From a report: Virginia is described as the datacenter capital of the world, particularly Northern Virginia where it is understood there are about 300 facilities. According to the Financial Times, water consumption by bit barns in some areas has increased markedly over the past five years by almost two-thirds. It cites data gathered by freedom of information requests to claim that more than 1.85 billion US gallons was used in 2023, up from 1.13 billion gallons in 2019.

Those figures came from water authorities in Northern Virginia in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Fauquier counties. Water is typically used in datacenters for cooling, and the FT points to anxiety over expected increases in demand for computing infrastructure due to AI, which is particularly power intensive during processing for training of large models. It reported that some existing facilities are in water-stressed regions, including parts of Virginia suffering from droughts.
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Virginia's Datacenters Guzzle Water Like There's No Tomorrow, Says FOI-based Report More

Virginia's Datacenters Guzzle Water Like There's No Tomorrow, Says FOI-based Report

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  • Don't worry, we can solar-panel and windmill our way out of this... /s
    • Well, you can. Rejecting heat through evaporation is the cheapest and easiest, since water has a much higher heat capacity than, say, air. But with more energy you can blow more air around and accomplish the same thing. Just check out the article: "He also claimed that most new facilities use no water for cooling."

      • Well, you can. Rejecting heat through evaporation is the cheapest and easiest, since water has a much higher heat capacity than, say, air. But with more energy you can blow more air around and accomplish the same thing. Just check out the article: "He also claimed that most new facilities use no water for cooling."

        Cooling by direct immersion in dielectric fluid doesn't use any water; it goes straight to an air/liquid heat exchanger.

    • Don't worry, we can solar-panel and windmill our way out of this... /s

      Not sure what you're being sarcastic about, more power capacity would definitely help.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        I am knocking people's idea that technology can solve all of our problems. Data centers doing dubious work are what caused this article's complaint in the first place! :)

  • Huh? (Score:3)

    by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Monday August 19, 2024 @02:46PM (#64718606)
    Can someone please explain why these datacenters can't recirculate the water to reduce usage? Car washes do this, but datacenters are even more favorable to reuse since they keep the water in a clean closed loop for cooling. I don't understand why they need so much new fresh water constantly, besides wasteful design.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)

      by mukundajohnson ( 10427278 ) on Monday August 19, 2024 @02:53PM (#64718626)

      https://www.reddit.com/r/expla... [reddit.com] The gist I understand is that they lose a bunch to evaporation. Probably too complex or impractical to save the water with the cooling method. There are a lot of examples in that thread.

      • Interesting reddit thread. Sounds to me though that they use the water because they can. They just want to save money and not size their cooling system for hot days. They probably did their homework and found that this way is cheaper. Can't be that difficult to get creative with waste heat from a data center? Combine it with a heat intensive industry. Dry tomatos with it! Also evaporates water. Dry apple slices, ...

        • What about infrared solar panels? "Using technology similar to night-vision goggles, researchers have developed a device that can generate electricity from thermal radiation."

          • What about infrared solar panels? "Using technology similar to night-vision goggles, researchers have developed a device that can generate electricity from thermal radiation."

            Are you referring to thermoradiative arrays [nasa.gov]? They're an energy generation technique, not a cooling technology.

            I love the technology (as should be clear from the link, or this [nasa.gov] one), but they're still a long way from commercialization. (And, unless something changes, they're not going to be good for terrestrial use; power goes as T^4, and 350K just doesn't give enough power to make them worthwhile).

        • It's difficult to store the heat and move it elsewhere. No one wants to live next to a data center, but if they did, they could have endless hot water.
          • Put datacenter next to tomato drier plant? Should be doable. Use the heat day and night to dry clothes, ... Put servers in a professional dry cleaner factory. There is something missing here.
      • If you do the math, it seems like it is evaporation losses in cooling towers. 1.85e9 / 300 / 365 / 24 / 60 = ~12GPM. Sorry for the US customary units. That's within the makeup water requirements for some moderately sized cooling towers. https://www.advantageengineeri... [advantageengineering.com] There are some technologies you can use to avoid this, like DX cooling, but that comes with the risks associated with refrigerants.

    • Can someone please explain why these datacenters can't recirculate the water to reduce usage? Car washes do this, but datacenters are even more favorable to reuse since they keep the water in a clean closed loop for cooling. I don't understand why they need so much new fresh water constantly, besides wasteful design.

      Adding that the water doesn't simply disappear after being used for cooling, so those, "parts of Virginia suffering from droughts" should still be able to use it downstream and it should have cooled off then -- even ignoring how the warmed water may affect wildlife on the way.

    • It's probably cheaper to get fresh cool water than to cool it. Thing is, especially with the water, the devil is in the details. While there are many places, and most importantly many people, lacking decent water a large part of the problem is just the distribution and there are plenty of places where there is more than enough and "saving it" there won't help any other place (and don't forget water is the most renewable resource on Earth if there was ever one). In fact some municipalities are having problem

    • The water needs to be fairly clean, and in some cases deionized, in order to do Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC). After the water becomes contaminated they dump it out and bring in more (drinking) water. It's low complexity and low capital cost, but high operating cost to guzzle all that water for your GPUs. DLC is also very efficient compared to other non-phase change cooling methods.

      If you had a closed system, with any kind of coolant medium and an heat exchanger. Then you can either build a cooling tower, or

      • How much water do you turn into evaporation that would have flowed freely otherwise?

        • For DLC? Very little lost to evporation. You aren't boiling water. :)

          You're just raising its temperature by a small amount, the amount depends on your flow rate. Say your inlet temp is 14C and output is 15C. That 1C will cause a slightly higher rate of evaporation, but it's not a lot. Keeping water in a cooling pond exposed to wind will evaporate more water than that, even if it was exactly the same temperature.

          There could be a swamp cooler effect. In that large amounts of passive evaporation will increase

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )

            Say your inlet temp is 14C and output is 15C.

            If you're using water, that small temperature difference is going to require circulating a lot of water. It would typically be around 5C to 8C temperature rise to keep the rate of flow down. Even 2-phase coolants are typically going to require more than a 1C temperature rise.

            • The flow rate is pretty high for ASHRAE W4 because you are typically running a long circuit before it goes back to the chiller. For W3 you would have a cooling tower and you could just keep a huge thermal mass in the system (lots of water) instead of pumping so aggressively. Cycling water out of the system for replacement is done before the chiller, and it won't be that hot since you wouldn't do it under load anyways as it is a maintenance activity.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )
          You typically lose 3% to evaporation in traditional cooling systems with recirculation. It can vary greatly for other types of systems that return water to its' source, depending on how much you need to cool the water, the ambient temperature and humidity, etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        And of course then people would see this hyperboloid nuclear reactor looking tower that releases a thin mist of water vapor all day long as some kind of dangerous radioactive object in the community and the NIMBY faction would shut it down.

        Most cooling towers do not look like that. Those are natural draft towers. Most cooling towers use fans, are a lot smaller, and usually hidden from view.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nazsco ( 695026 )
      You are still "destroying" the water.

      pristine water supporting wild life -> treated water with chlorine and fluoride -> data-center/or cities -> waste (cannot send back to city, nor support wild life)

      Now you have to dump it into a treatment plant, which doesn't exist in most places, and/or wait for it to evaporate and rain back into the ecosystem it was supporting in the beginning.

      • You are still "destroying" the water.
        pristine water supporting wild life -> treated water with chlorine and fluoride

        Why would you treat the water with chlorine or fluorine to use it for cooling?

    • How do you cool the recirculated water? - That's the bit you're missing. A typical datacentre will have a cooling loop that is closed, transferring heat from inside the building to some kind of cooling unit outside. One of the simplest to operate systems will involve a heat exchanger to an open loop cooling system. If you don't have a naturally recircuiting system (like water from a river returned to the river, and an environmental permit allowing you to dump hot water into that river) then the most traditi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      They do.

      Not only that, they have been recycling used water: https://www.datacenterknowledg... [datacenterknowledge.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Can someone please explain why these datacenters can't recirculate the water to reduce usage?

      Conventionally, water-cooled chillers (which produce chilled water to cool the racks, usually indirectly by cooling the air) take in relatively cool water (around 85F+/-), reject heat to it (leaving at 95F+/-) run it though a cooling tower, where evaporative cooling brings it back down to around 85F even when the outside air temperature is around 95F, reject heat to it again, etc. Traditionally about 3 gpm per Ton

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      If they're using chillers, the water evaporates to carry the heat away. It'll fall again somewhere but not there.

    • Can someone please explain why these datacenters can't recirculate the water to reduce usage? Car washes do this, but datacenters are even more favorable to reuse since they keep the water in a clean closed loop for cooling. I don't understand why they need so much new fresh water constantly, besides wasteful design.

      From TFA:
      "Not everyone agrees. Commenting on the FT article via a LinkedIn post, Michael Lesniak of water systems company Aquatech claimed that most datacenters in Loudoun County use recycled sewage water that would otherwise be dumped in the Chesapeake Bay. He also claimed that most new facilities use no water for cooling.

      The bigger bit barn operators such as AWS have certainly pledged to take action over water consumption, with AWS announcing back in 2022 its intention to become water positive by 2030

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      The water does get recycled of course. The issue is that it comes out of the recycling process (as rain) in a different geographical location, from where it started.

      A closed loop of water doesn't (by itself) provide cooling as such. It can move some of the heat around, but you have to re-cool the water before you send it back around the loop, if you want to do any actual net cooling. A typical PC "water cooling" setup, uses a closed loop of water to transport heat from the CPU to a radiator on the outsid

  • Oh fuck! If only water was a renewable resource :( But everyone knows once that heated water evaporates or goes down the drain, it's gone forever

    • We've reached peak water. We need immediate and drastic cuts to all water-consuming activities along with the selling of indulgences, er. "hydrogen credits" to offset consumption. These would only apply to the U.S. and maybe a couple of European countries, naturally.

      • Then our leaders would pour water over themselves in public and swim in olympic size swimming pools filled with children, then walk in front of a podium and tell us that because of systemic racism or whatever else, we're going to have to pay our fair share via a tax based on how many sweat drops we produce.

    • Plus, it's VIRGINIA. A drought there is like a flood in Arizona.

      • >"Plus, it's VIRGINIA. A drought there is like a flood in Arizona."

        Virginia is a large state with a lot of variety of conditions/topology and climate. Mountains, piedmonts, forests, plains, large rivers/lakes, beaches, swamps, large cities, suburban sprawl, small towns, agricultural areas, ranches, etc. No rainforests or deserts, though :) Although most of VA is "temperate", there are quite a few areas that do end up with droughts some years, especially in the Summer, and especially in the high-popul

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by djm ( 126641 )

        I was driving near Shenandoah National Park in Virginia a few weeks ago, and several of the towns we went through had electronic signs on their main road telling people to conserve water because they were in a drought.

  • There's LOTS of room in the extreme northern parts of Canada and Europe for instance. Build them there and use the outside air instead of water. Use the heated air to heat the facility's dorms so the workers don't freeze to death. Make it a rotating work schedule like off-shore oil rigs. Heck, I would gladly spend a 6 month on / 6 month off rotation at a facility like that (I'm an autistic introvert so perfect for someone like me). Lots of room for solar panels and wind turbines as well to partially power t

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )
      Your solution is great. However, being involved in local politics where I live, I know how much politicians like to brag when they "bring more jobs to the area" with new datacenter builds. It's stupid because they take up lots of land and create very few jobs, but politicians rarely care about details or facts.

      The best angle would be for some company to build the datacenters in those cold climates and pay for the data infrastructure to the location, then sell space to companies. Even then you get laws pass
  • Maybe they know something we don't...
  • I have a few uneducated questions that I'm curious about which I hope could provide some context around this.

    1) What is "used water" from a data center? While water is technically a renewable resource, it takes time for that to happen and the primary issue with water is the rate at which it fills the reservoir or ground water (from rainfall or rivers usually coming from snowpack which in a climate change world is becoming less reliable) but also from the ability to reclaim or clean "used water" from se

    • Water Rich like Virgina USA. This is a nothing burger because once the rivers hit the Chesapeake bay tidal zone they are salt water and useless to all but fish farms. If the rivers above the navigable water slow to a trickle it is effective water management in the sense that is acceptable to California.

  • How come they're not recycling water in a closed loop?

    • Laws of Thermodynamics.... the purpose of the water is to use the enthalpy of vaporization to take the waste heat of data center and send it safely into the rest of the universe so cryptominining has a work effort to bill against. The 3K above absolute zero radiative sink of space cools the atmosphere constantly, and the water rains back into the ocean (mostly because of winds out of the west). The only long term effect is the impact on the heat death of the universe is one billionth of a billionth of

  • Most of "data center alley" uses reclaimed water.

    Example older article: https://www.datacenterknowledg... [datacenterknowledge.com]

  • An irrigated farm may or may not be a net contributor to the economy if you subtract the subsidies. A farm takes up a huge amount of land. Both consume large amounts of water that evaporates away. Per dollar contributed to GDP which do you think is a better way to spend the water? And don't give me food is a necessity, what is the obesity rate in the USA? The world on average is consuming more calories than it should.

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