[bradknowles]

Datacenters need four things: power, water, cooling, and access to the WAN.

A dry desert environment is not very conducive to datacenter operations with regards to those first three items.

If you’re located close to the sea or an ocean, at least there’s a possibility of getting water, albeit perhaps through expensive reverse osmosis. But then you’re operating in a more humid environment where certain types of cooling systems won’t work well, because they depend on water evaporation to function.

If you’re building a multigigawatt AI datacenter, those are two types of environments that you want to avoid.

So, whether it’s Houston Texas or the UAE, I think that’s a very poor location for a datacenter.

[tim333]

If you're just using water for cooling does it have to be desalinated?

[bradknowles]

Salt water is a nasty substance and difficult to handle properly. That salt interacts with metal and other substances in the pipeline, etc….

You might not have to go to fully potable (drinkable) status to get something that will work for cooling, but there’s a lot of processing that needs to happen.