| ▲ | thereisnospork 4 days ago | |
Data center water consumption isn't due to it's use as a heat transfer medium, it's due to the evaporative cooling which cashes in water's enthalpy of vaporization. Thr alternative would be to use a heat pump and spend electricity to cool the water that cools the servers. | ||
| ▲ | nine_k 4 days ago | parent [-] | |
Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option. OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :( [1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic... | ||