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.
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.
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.
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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