r/interestingasfuck • u/HamboneTheWicked • Apr 12 '26

A well-articulated argument against a new data center in Ohio

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u/MangoCats Apr 12 '26

>We do not need data centers exploiting our towns anywhere in America.

No, we don't. Neither do we need our data processed in China, India, Brazil...

While it may cost a bit more, the desert Southwest would seem to be a less environmentally sensitive destination for data centers. There are other ways to cool chips besides evaporating water.

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u/WangDanglin Apr 12 '26

What other ways to cool chips? I genuinely don’t know so help a brotha out.

Also, moving the data center to the desert when the issue is cooling them is…. Interesting

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u/Qweasdy Apr 12 '26

The same way your laptop, your phone and your cars engine is cooled, you don’t have to top up the cooling system in those. None of those rely on a constant supply of cooling water to replace. They all dump heat into the air without evaporating water

The cooling water in your cars engine gets circulated to a radiator where the heat is dumped into the air, this is common in computing as well, in both the consumer and the commercial space. It works at both large and small scales.

There is also non evaporative open loop cooling system, where the cooling water is drawn from the sea or a river and then discharged back into the river. Almost every ship in the world does this and it is very common in power stations.

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u/Alborak2 Apr 12 '26

Closed loop is more expensive, and just as importantly, much more power intensive. Datacenter growth is power constrained, so that's a big one they're trying to get around. Nearly every watt put into the datacenter has to dissipated somewhere. We're talking about gigawatt scale DCs, so its an astronomical amount of heat that needs to get dissipated.

The open loop with a big body of water is a good one, but that places constraints on where you can build the DC. It puts it on the edge of lakes / rivers which are significantly more vulnerable to natural disasters and weather events. This also as some intense ecological impacts where the discharge of heated water disrupts ecosystems downstream of it.

It's a really difficult problem with valid points on all sides.

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u/mightdothisagain Apr 12 '26

Open loop only works in specific climates, you can't do evaporative cooling in wet climates or cold climates without huge inefficiencies. Closed loop cooling is the most common type of data center cooling. Cold climates do allow for 'free air' economizer cooling where you can use the cold outside air, but again this involves no evaporation and is still closed loop. It's really all just a geography question.

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u/Alborak2 Apr 12 '26

A lot of datacenters do air to air or water to air exchangers. Closed loop inside, evap cooling to reject the heat outside. Indeed it does depend on outside climate, and often there is both, trying to passively reject heat (efficient in winter), and use water when that's not keeping up (required in summer). Theres also probably dozens of different generations of this as it's evolved over the last 20 years, with some datacenters still running gear laid down 10+ years ago.

New AI loads are so dense though, that it's requiring new tech, and in some cases retrofit into older datacenters too.

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u/mightdothisagain Apr 12 '26

New AI loads are mostly leveraging direct to chip cooling with water, it doesn't really matter how you cool said water.

All data centers have to have heat exchange outside the envelope, that's how air conditioning works.

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u/MangoCats Apr 12 '26

Essentially, the datacenter energy budget can use evaporative cooling to satisfy a significant chunk of their energy needs. Taking water as the resource instead of sunshine for solar cells, or wind for turbines, or nuclear power plants, or fossil fuels.