Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it’s Texas, so it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it’s gone.
Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it’s coming from many sources and it’s being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there’s only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.
Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
I doubt those are constantly consuming large amounts of water. hydro just lets it through, and nuclear has chained closed loop systems, and they also let through some after the last loop
A hydro reservoir has much higher evaporation than if there was no reservoir. That’s usually a big part of the discussion when a downstream nation objects against another nation building a dam upstream from them.
Depending on the source, nuclear uses a bit more/a bit less water than coal. But they are in the same order of magnitude.
Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.
For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it’s Texas, so it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it’s gone.
Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it’s coming from many sources and it’s being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there’s only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.
That is super helpful, thank you.
I doubt those are constantly consuming large amounts of water. hydro just lets it through, and nuclear has chained closed loop systems, and they also let through some after the last loop
A hydro reservoir has much higher evaporation than if there was no reservoir. That’s usually a big part of the discussion when a downstream nation objects against another nation building a dam upstream from them.
Depending on the source, nuclear uses a bit more/a bit less water than coal. But they are in the same order of magnitude.
Ps: biomass power generation is a crime against nature.
oh, I wasn’t aware of that, makes sense.
why, what’s the problem with that?
edit: just opened the page to see the stats better, and yeah, I see now