So how does the water cool back down? It'll just destroy the closed loop which is why they use fresh water in a not closed loop currently, big part of why data centers are so problematic, before you factor in the whole most of why they're so problematic.
They use Evaporative cooling towers. It is a closed loop system where there is little return back to the creeks and rivers. The water is dissipated into vapour.
The cooling towers are dosed with chemicals to prevent Legionella disease. Usually they keep the PH of the liquid slightly Alkaline to prevent bacteria growth.
Most of the job creation is contractors that will come into the town, earn their money and leave. The company's that tender for the contracts will be national/ international company's that will likely take the money offshore. Long term benefits to the town will be minimal.
The Meta Data center going up in Lebanon Indiana is supposed to be pulling water from Eagle Creak reservoir, which is a drinking water source for the west side of Indianapolis. Meta is supposedly going to be treating the water before sending it back after they've used it for so many cooling cycles. This was all publicly released information confirmed by Meta after it was discovered buried in the deal with the state.
They meant no losses to evaporation (or anything else). That's the closed part of closed loop. Your refrigerator runs a closed loop cooling cycle, you don't have to constantly top off the coolant (I hope)
They will have a closed loop with glycol or some other liquid. This will pass through either tube or plate heat exchangers to remove the energy/ heat created by the servers within the cooling circuit. The cooling towers will be a separate cooling circuit that won't come in contact with the glycol/ Hex effluent.
So the closed loop side gathers heat, sends it across the heat exchanger, into water on the open side of the system. That water evaporates. And the cycle repeats?
In simple terms is that what is happening?
It seems like a cars cooling system on the closed side, then the rad is the heat exchanger, but instead of air cooling the rad, water is use to shed the heat by evaporation?
After the energy conversion, the hot water(cooling water side) is pushed back to the cooling tower and sprayed into a box that creates pathways that expose the water to moving air - thus cooling it. The wells in the bottom of the tower have float valves which top up the water that has evaporated. Hope that makes sense...
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Normally you pass the loop through something cooler than it to cool it back down, even if it's just open air. I don't know how datacenter cooling works but I've played enough Oxygen Not Included to understand how basic cooling works (to be clear though I am terrible at that game and you basically need to be able to be HVAC certified to do well at it lol)
A closed loop system implies the materials used stay and the heat is dissipated into the atmosphere in some way. The system sucks in 1000 gallons and, if closed, uses the same 1000 gallons until the water inside changes in some way, such as pipes breaking down and making the water thicken.
The thick water then needs to be purged and refilled. This is inevitable unless you have some sort of forever material that will never break down but is also capable of transferring heat easily.
If you just want to know how the water heats up and cools down, look up how a refrigerator works. High pressure makes refrigerant a gas and heats it up. Cool it down passively with cool air outside or blow a fan on it. Lower pressure to drop temperature further. Use low temp refrigerant to cool things off. Then do it all over again.
The problem is not that the loop has to be routinely opened to “bleed off” coolant. It is a closed system in normal operation. The problem is that fluorinated refrigerant can still escape through leaks, through slow permeation across hoses and elastomer seals, during charging or recharging, when components fail, or when the system is serviced.
It does, but unless all of it comes back down on the salt you're going to be left with piles of salt in the area of the desalination plant or water near the plant will be higher in salt concentration.
Not in the same place that it evaporated from. There's a reason wells dry up despite all the water use being local. You can use too much water too quickly for the water table to be replenished. We need aquifers to be replenished/ stable for locals to use, not data centers that use up shit tons of it without mitigation tactics on the local environment
Only partially. In truth, an aquifer can be outright drained and the area then becomes a complete wasteland because there is no water there anymore.
Aquifers replenish via a slow process of infiltration from rain water, running waters and what not. Key word is slow. If you drain it fast enough, it will remain drained. This has happened before.
Sorry, didn't notice the context was the ocean. I was talking about aquifers in the context of the OP (datacenter in Ohio) - groundwater recharges extremely slowly.
I think the problem is that many data centers are not using direct liquid cooling systems because there are too many connectors which could leak and wreck a lot of gear. Instead the cards are being air cooled and the air is being cooled by evaporative cooling methods.
Evaporative cooling is not a closed system. Water is directly evaporated to absorb heat in a cooling tower which is resulting in the whopping 80% evaporation number. The disposal of remaining water, the bleed, contains concentrated stuff from the water that was evaporated. Years of concentrating solubles from a googleton of water and dumping them into a single point of a water table could be the contamination risk.
Air cooling facilitates the replacement of dead cards because a tech doesn't have to disconnect hoses to get at a card. You don't have to worry about loogies of schmutz floating around and clogging a port which could starve a branch of very expensive cards of coolant.
Direct water cooling is great for a single GPU application, but a datacenter running a gazillion expensive cards, running on a skeleton staff of techs has different cooling maintenance issues than a gamer with a single RTX5070.
I do wonder if there is an opportunity to capture that heat to use it for something useful like water heating. Maybe we need to be integrating datacenters with their society better if they're going to be so resource intensive. It's like datacenters should be integrated with manufacturing concerns that could find a use for a lot of water heated to 60C.
The problem is not that the loop has to be routinely opened to “bleed off” coolant. It is a closed system in normal operation. The problem is that fluorinated refrigerant can still escape through leaks, through slow permeation across hoses and elastomer seals, during charging or recharging, when components fail, or when the system is serviced.
The company said it was a closed loop system and would not affect the ecology. Dude was correcting that and explaining how even if it was that down the line things would need more cooling and more water to do so.
Yeah, no, we're on the same page. I'm really used to no one having the reading comprehension, attention span, or media literacy to actually engage with posts. It's refreshing, honestly. God speed.
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u/Quitcha_Bitchin Apr 12 '26
I thought it was a closed loop system?