this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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What do datacenters need large volumes of running water for? Can they not do a continuous loop? It's for cooling computers, right? That can't be done with a closed loop of water?
A closed loop just moves away the heat, you still need to cool the water, else it keeps rising in temperature until it doesn't cool enough. On desktops this can be achieved with fans, which isn't surprising as waterless setups of fans can already cool down most desktop CPUs. On a data center (and power plants), this is not feasible as they generate too much heat. They would need massive fans and would raise the air temperature like crazy.
My next thought would be to find a use for the heat; colocate the data center with some other facility that needs massive quantities of heat. I remember something about a spa that heated its pools with computers (I think mining bitcoin, but still). I've also been curious if heat pumps could get hot enough to bake bread at industrial scales. Pump heat out of a data center and into a bigass bread oven?
There have been houses that are warmed with data center heat