Kicking Datacenters' Drinking Habit is Nearly Impossible
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The explosive growth of datacenters that followed ChatGPT's debut in 2022 has shone a spotlight on the environmental impact of these power-hungry facilities.
But it's not just power we have to worry about. These facilities are capable of sucking down prodigious quantities of water.
In the US, datacenters can consume anywhere between 300,000 and four million gallons of water a day to keep the compute housed within them cool, Austin Shelnutt of Texas-based Strategic Thermal Labs explained in a presentation at SC24 in Atlanta this fall.
We'll get to why some datacenters use more water than others in a bit, but in some regions rates of consumption are as high as 25 percent of the municipality's water supply.
This level of water consumption, understandably, has led to concerns over water scarcity and desertification, which were already problematic due to climate change, and have only been exacerbated by the proliferation of generative AI. Today, the AI datacenters built to train these models often require tens of thousands of GPUs, each capable of generating 1,200 watts of power and heat.
However, over the next few years, hyperscalers, cloud providers, and model builders plan to deploy millions of GPUs and other AI accelerators requiring gigawatts of energy, and that means even higher rates of water consumption.
[...] One of the reasons that datacenter operators have gravitated toward evaporative coolers is because they're so cheap to operate compared to alternative technologies.
[...] In terms of energy consumption, this makes an evaporatively cooled datacenter far more energy efficient than one that doesn't consume water, and that translates to alower operating cost.
[...] "You have to understand water is a scarce resource. Everybody has to start at that base point," he explained. "You have to be good stewards of that resource just to ensure that you're utilizing it effectively."
[...] While dry coolers and chillers may not consume water onsite, they aren't without compromise. These technologies consume substantially more power from the local grid and potentially result in higher indirect water consumption.
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