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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Why the hell are they trying to build data centers in the fucking Sonoran Desert anyway.
It's not their water, so they don't care. When it finally runs out, they'll just go somewhere else.
I mean, sure, that's their plan, but you can only do that so many times before you run out of money, materials, water, or places to build. If ever there was proof that there's no forward thinking in this tech bubble, this would be it.
That's someone else's problem. Hopefully someone after they're dead, but as long as they have their golden parachute, who cares?
True but this isn't specific to the tech bubble. It's a feature of capitalism. Competition forces firms to adopt shorter term horizons. If a firm has significant profit to make by focusing on the short term and it does not, its competitor would. If the profit possoble within this period is significant, having the competitor collect it runs the risk of the current firm failing, or the competitor accumulating enough for hostile takeover, among other failures. That would stop the current firm onwer from collecting profits in the future. Even if focusing on the long term is more profitable over time, firms may not survive in a competitive environment to realize long term profits. These are some of the fundamental processes that drive firms into short term horizons. With liquid asset markets there are even more immediate processes driving firms into short term planning.
Add to that planning based mainly on prices, which don't capture a ton of reality and you get situations like a water hungry datacenter in the desert, cause the price of water does not capture its long term availability for example.
All of this has happened in the past, even a century ago. It's happened and keeps happening in other industries too. For example the fossil fuel industry.
That's more an artifact of modern corporate structure where a publicity traded entity must always be growing or it will be considered a failure.
They're locusts. They don't think about anything past the next fiscal quarter.
That is so thoughtless and shortsighted of them! If we run out of water, how will the poor Saudis grow alfalfa for their racehorses?
Low humidity. Good for longevity of electronics, and makes the evaporative cooling more efficient. So it’s a matter of the benefits of that vs. the cost of the added heat.
Land is also relatively cheap.
Farms, now data centers? Let's add a Nestlé water or coca Cola factory.
Yeah, seems like a desert isn’t the best place to build something where cooling is a critical factor! Or building something that uses massive amounts of chemical treated water for cooling in a place that has had water scarcity concerns for generations, now.
I don't understand why they even need to use up water. Water cooling does not require you to evaporate the water. You can just keep it as a closed system and reuse the water.
If nuclear power plants can manage it which would be easy for a server farm
Because closed loops are more expensive in the short term, making it a non-starter
I guess water is cheep enough.
Still kinda obnoxious though. Like they couldn't see that the ultra high water usage was the thing that would get the most pushback from?
Closed loop watercooling is really just air cooling with extra steps. The water is heated by the devices and cooled by a large radiator with fans. Or it's cooled with a chiller which in turn is cooled by a radiator with fans.
Replacing the water is the most effective (yet wasteful) way to remove the heat.
To a point, yes. While you’re still using air to cool the water, I think it’s still a little more efficient than blindly keeping the server room at a low-ish temperature.
Keeping the server room cool is just using an air conditioner which is cooled by a radiator with a fan, and then using that cooled air to cool another radiator with a fan. Every step is a loss of efficiency.
The main advantage of water loops is that you get to use a different form factor for the radiator and fan by moving it away from the source of heat and aren't limited by the case dimensions.
its also colder at night, because the desert doesnt retain heat much? in places like vegas its hot, because the asphalt and concrete absorbs heat.
They building a new data center in the bay area California that is struggling for water all the time. But its OK they are building it upstream towards the reservoir so they can get first dibs
So that one's not too worried about the tectonic stability thing, then.
What’s it called/who should I look up to learn about this?
Its an amazon data center in Gilroy, been in the works for a long time but they recently put up the development signs so I think now that they ran the new water lines a like a year ago they are ready to break ground
They don’t even have enough water for the garlic anymore, and that’s the crop equivalent of a fucking lizard :(
I wonder if they could use sea water for that. I know salt is corrosive, but surely there's a reasonable solution there.
seawater would probably corrode whatever storage system they have in there overtime, all that biological material, chemicals and gunk.
Sure. A lot of that can be filtered out, but there will be corrosion with whatever heat transfer system they use. However, seawater is free, pretty consistently cool temperature (esp. in the Pacific), and is plentiful, so replacing some heat exchange components shouldn't be overly burdensome.
It's not like they're dunking the electronics in the water. They just need to filter it enough it doesn't clog up the system and run it in a closed loop.
If I can have a closed loop with a reservoir for my home PC, motherfucking Amazon can build a water storage tank for their cooling.
But that would require large capital investments that negatively impacts earnings reports.
Much better to screw over the people by taking their water for free.
Sure, but that means more space to allow for cooling the water so it can be reused. If you can cycle it w/ "unlimited" cool water from the ocean, it can be a lot more compact, and heated waste water could potentially be used by a desalinization plant to improve freshwater output.
Nuclear plants do that with lakes, they suck in cool water from one end and dump out the hot water at the other so that it can cool down by the time it circulates back in
I remember there was talks about a floating data center in the ocean.
I'd much rather have underwater data centers. A floating data center seems like a massive eyesore and you'd need to run cables out there.
If you build one underground near the shore and then channel water in from the ocean, it should be much less intrusive.
It still has problems. Mainly you need to get power out there and the heated exhaust water can mess with the ecosystem.
Right, by "near the shore" I meant a land-based facility with access to sea water. Heated exhaust water could also be used in a local desalinization plant to produce fresh water for maximum efficiency.