[al_borland]

Get rid of the cooling towers and condense the water, then treat like normal. Or put it into a closed loop with a radiator.

These are solved problems, I assume it’s just a question of cost and short-term vs long-term thinking.

It seems almost criminal that there are still so many people without safe water, and we’re using billions of gallons for temporary cooling of data centers, just to let it evaporate off.

Using a data center as a heat source for desalination may be another idea, where instead of data centers using fresh water, they could produce it. I looked into it briefly and it sounds like some universities and companies are exploring this. Instead of these data centers causing problems people want to avoid, they could solve problems people already have.

[colechristensen]

Evaporative cooling towers would be fine if it were a closed loop, the amount evaporated isn't worth that much concern. They're dumping ALL of the water that they intake after using it once. The evaporative or other cooling methods are just to lessen the environmental impact of dumping hot water back into the environment.