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by zachrose 1276 days ago
Where does the water go after being used for cooling?
1 comments

It evaporates, the heat is used to evaporate the water.
Do they heat it that much to evaporate a lot of it? I've read about one water cooled DC, don't remember which one exactly. But I do remember they were drawing water at around 15C and returning back to the river at 20C.
They're using evaporative cooling. It isn't just a basic heat exchanger.
Dumb question, but can't they condense the water and collect it somewhere?
Same question. Why cant it be a closed loop system?
DC would cook itself in a couple of hours.

Closed loop system for a system this big and hungry would demand many km^2 of radiators with a forced air-flow. Look at your A/C external unit - it's barely handles 10-15C degree difference for a small room and that is for a human with a measly 300-500 BTU/h. A typical server is 2000 to 6000 BTU/h, depending on the configuration and a typical 42U rack would have at least 10-15 servers, not counting TOR switches and other shenanigans.

The hydrological cycle is already a closed loop system. The water you drink today watered a plant 10,000 years ago, passed through Abraham Lincoln's kidneys, or was drank by Genghis Khan.
how does that work? the chips are only 95°C do you use a refrigerant cycle to gain heat from there? it's hard to see how you could make this work
Maybe they could borrow cooling technology from the mechanism used by humans on hot days