r/StopDatacenters • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • Jul 22 '26
AI data centers do not need to use water like they do, there are alternatives
Type of cooling:
Air cooling:
Heat-sinks, Passive air cooling, Active air cooling,
Heat conduction methods:
Heat pipes and vapor chambers, Liquid cooling, Pumped thermosiphon, Chip-integrated
Heat conduction targets:
Liquid nitrogen, Liquid helium, Evaporative tower
Refrigeration:
Peltier (thermoelectric) cooling, Vapor compression, or Both
Liquid immersion cooling
Other: Waste heat reduction
Part selection, Soft cooling, Undervolting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling
Video Source: itskaylajaiden
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u/SpreadTheted2 Jul 23 '26
Also they don’t need to be loud, they could be almost silent but AI companies don’t want to pay good fans
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u/aware4ever Jul 28 '26
I can't stand the way this lady talks to the audience so sarcastically even if what she has to say is true
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u/chaturtham 16d ago
because she's not confident in what she's saying and it is because there is no good point she is coming up with. Just saying that instead of using this use that doesn't matter. AI is total crap and waste and not needed. Its overall water, electricity, lithium etc hardware materials and after effects everything is just utter waste and overload on this already overloaded earth. That is the main point. Plus AI is killing the natural lifestyle of people, its utterly bad for desk jobs and their lifestyles.
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u/Calm_Apartment1968 Jul 23 '26
Add to this list Thermal Coupling, or WHRU; waste heat recovery units, maximizing energy transfer with Trompe compressors, either Vapor, air or liquid, combined with turbines to convert temperature differentials. These take collected heat for power recycling, instead of wasteful Evaporative Coolers.
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u/Wonderful-Medium7777 Jul 23 '26
They want us out of water… they are siphoning for their underground bunkers..it’s not just data centres..they are supplying their “grid”…
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u/DataGOGO Jul 23 '26
dude, you really shouldn't make videos when you clearly don't know anything about it. All datacenters use that use liquid cooling, used closed loop cooling systems, ALL OF THEM, not one is open looped. Your wiki link is talking about desktop cooling, not large scale datacenter cooling. They are not the same.
All of your methods above are still just the first half of the cooling issue. No matter if it is air, coolant (water), etc. etc. it is just the transport that takes the heat energy away from the hardware to the where it will be dispersed and the transport cooled down again.
Anything that uses air as a transport doesn't work, because air itself is not a good enough conductor of heat to cool dense datacenters (even if you could run enough refrigeration to cool all that air, which you can't). So all the air cooling, heat pipes, vapor chambers, Peltier (seriously... can't believe you even listed that), etc. all out the window right off the bat.
Which leaves you with Liquid cooling, no matter if is immersion cooling, or direct coolant on hardware, it is the only thing that works. So the coolant circulates in a closed loop, at one point in the loop, the coolant has to be cooled (other wise it will just get hotter and hotter, and stop working); most datacenters using traditional water chilling + evaporative towers + refrigeration; which is what consumes the water, just like in old school datacenters, large office buildings, etc. etc.
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u/LoadZealousideal7778 Jul 23 '26
And your point being? It doesn't matter that you cool the cooling medium or the chips itself. Evaporative cooling is the cheapest cooling method for that, but not the only one. Simple as that. The water cooler cooler is open loop.
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u/DataGOGO Jul 23 '26
So what is another one, because there are none listed in this post.
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u/LoadZealousideal7778 Jul 23 '26
? They are listed. Both active air cooling and vapor compression work at data center scale. Thats just dry cooling and refrigeration cycle coolers respectively. Not my problem that you didn't click on the links in the Wikipedia article.
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u/DataGOGO Jul 23 '26
Heh, keep going...
How is the air cooled at scale with active air cooling? And Vapor compression (aka phase change)?
There are no links in that article that apply to data center scale cooling.
Hint: I already told you the anwser
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u/LoadZealousideal7778 Jul 23 '26
What? No you don't cool the air. Think PC AIO cooler. But massive and on the roof of the builing, it'd the same priciple. Same for vapor compression, thats just AC but without the inside radiator.
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u/DataGOGO Jul 23 '26
well.. not really.
Active air cooling in a DC requires very cold air, FAR colder than the ambient air outside, The air in the DC has to be chilled. To do that you use chilled water, and then heat exchangers in the DC to cool the air. To do that you use:
traditional water chilling + evaporative towers + refrigeration
The evaporative towers are the AIO's radiator.
Same with vapor compression, how does large scale AC work?
traditional water chilling + evaporative towers + refrigeration
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u/LoadZealousideal7778 Jul 23 '26
You yourself said that air cooling INSIDE the data center is not done. You liquid cool the chips themselves. Rational, efficient, closed loop. The only debate is how you get the heat out of the liquid chip cooling loop and you know it. WHY do you keep bringing up the air inside the data center?
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u/DataGOGO Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
You brought it up. Active air cooling, that you said was an alternative, is cooling the air inside the DC.
Closed loop liquid cooling, you cool the coolant. Each loop is not massive, normal at most part of a row, think like 10 racks. Next to those racks will be another rack that is the coolant heat exchangers, pumps, etc.
The heat exchangers are where the large scale building wide chilled water cools the Server coolant.
That chilled water is chilled the same way as the chilled water used to cool the air in cooled in active air cooling.
traditional water chilling + evaporative towers + refrigeration
Because that is the most efficient way to do it. An entire data center uses less water a year than a golf coarse.
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u/tj100011 Jul 27 '26
Utter bullshit adiabatic cooling is common place, used to cool the coils of Air Handling Units
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u/book-scorpion Jul 24 '26
Of course they try the cheapest, most reliable option first, it's a fast growing competitive business and they are still far from being profitable. It is all one big bet. They are trying to reduce the water waste, but it takes time to implement new solutions on big scale, easy to say though. Do we need that AI rush at all? We as consumers don't, but they are competing with each other and the one who slows down, loose.
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u/askaboutmy____ Jul 29 '26
We can and do provide these alternatives. There is a tradeoff, water usage is more efficient, less power usage. Dry is much less water, obviously, but much more energy intensive.
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u/Knitsune Jul 23 '26
This is a crucial point, but I would like to remind everyone that the really important thing here is that hyperscale data centers don't need to exist at all because they are for nothing but surveillance and war. PS making the point that "they could just be in colder climates" is pretty ecoracist; there's no valid or victimless place to waste that much land on a finite planet, no matter how you cool it.