[yodon]

Data centers use evaporative cooling.

Data centers don't just heat up the water and return it - they evaporate the water into the atmosphere (yes, I know, the H2O still exists, but it's in a far less usable form when it's gaseous atmospheric H2O)

[kleton]

The Meta FTW data centers use evaporative chillers, but they re-condense the water so that it's a closed loop.

[sdenton4]

Yeah, the funny thing about the water claims is that there's a pretty simple technological fix: closed loop exists, and seems to be simply the better choice going forward as new DCs are built (excepting of course things like musk's 'rolling coal' bullshit).

[Bratmon]

The implicit claim that data centers don't recondense the water they evaporate is surprising to me.

Do you have a source?

[bruckie]

The claim that they would recondense the water is surprising to me. :)

I'm genuinely curious how recondensing would work. It seems like a Rube Goldberg machine to me. To recondense the water vapor, you would need to move a large amount of heat out of the water vapor into a heat sink so that it could cool down to the boiling point and undergo a phase change. What would that sink be, and how would you move the heat into it fast enough?

Air is the obvious answer, but if you are dumping heat into the air, why would you do it by evaporating and then condensing water, rather than transferring it directly (e.g. via a heat exchanger and fan)?

[yodon]

> Do you have a source?

Just what I've been told by people in the industry. I too would love to see more solid data.