Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?

Edit: Links provided in the comments…

Notable comments:

Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.

To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
    5·
    7 days ago

    The other question is: why do they have to use potable water, as opoosed to, for example, filtered river water?

    • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org
      41·
      7 days ago

      Because you cannot dump infinite amounts of heated water into a river, it will kill the species living downstream if the river gets warmer than maybe 25 degrees.

      • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
        9·
        7 days ago

        Could they not evaporate river water, instead of using drinking water?

        Edit: the volumes involved (from the other post) seem to indicate only the largest rivers could support the operation. Doesnt seem very viable at all. So lets just use up our valuable supplies of drinking water instead! /s

        • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org
          1·
          6 days ago

          This is most likely more expensive, because you need 2 water cycles. One with a clean cooling liquid that carries the heat from the CPUs to a heat Transfer/cooling block, and then another system that passes river water over the cooling block. You cannot just use the river water directly because of all the sediment and other elements in untreated water that may clog or corrode your pipes.