AI threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe's driest regions

I asked a friend who works on datacenter this so it's secondhand information but - apparently it's cheaper to use mist cooling where you essentially spray cold water on hot parts and it evaporates off instead of the normal closed loop system that you'd see in a home water cooling for example. And while it's not destroyed, it means you need a constant supply of clean water, and the evaporated water doesn't necessarily go back to the body of water you got it from.

In dry/warm climates, evaporative cooling is very efficient if you have the water to spare. Otherwise, everything is closed loop as you suggest.

> The water presumably isn't destroyed it's just put back hotter than before right?

I'd assume the water isn't put back into circulation after passing through a data center, so if anything it might be cooled and then reused in the same data center, best case scenario.

The results is the same, farmers who already have to fight to get enough water in Aragon now have to fight more and compete against companies like Amazon and other foreign investors for the water. Aragon isn't exactly wetlands, so hard to not feel the local government is making the wrong choice here.

As other have stated, evaporative cooling is most of the usage, AC dries the air and requires adding moisture to the air to prevent problems with static electricity, this drives a much smaller portion of the usage.

Note that evaporative cooling also produces significant amounts of brine, as it is similar to distillation, producing a brine that is difficult to treat and often not useful for other purposes.

Apparently, it does not have to be this way. According to https://youtu.be/GhIJs4zbH0o?t=895 Stargate is designed with a "closed loop system" that will be filled up just once.

I think the issue is the volume of water needed to cool these systems during peak hours. Even if the water is reclaimed, allocating all that water for availability by the data centers distorts availability for everyone else in the region.

Similar to other industries, the water isn't lost per se, but it's deferred. It takes a considerable amount of time for water to do the whole loop and end back where it started, so the more you defer, the less you have available for consumption at any given time.

Rain can deposit water in seas or lands away from country's border. Anyhow its always efficient and easy to collect water from a running river on its way to sea.

Data centres can be designed to harvest the steam / evaporated water and reuse it but thats expensive too and they might not choose to do so.

I we would really have a chance to ask an official, whomever that may be, either from government or the tech companies, the (scripted) answer would probably go like this:

By 2030, AI will make revolutionary advancements in water management which will reduce our total water consumption, reduce waste, improve the wastewater treatment efficiency by 15x, so that, overall, the industry is not consuming but producing water.

Putting a price on it does not solve it because the entities that compete for the water with the data centers are out-matched financially. How is a city that has a budget that is constantly dealing with budget cuts supposed to pay more for water than a multi-billion dollar company? Taxing it does not solve it either, because there are so many incentives to writing loopholes into the tax code.

They don't even have to use water - there are alternatives. The solve is changing behavior of the leaders in this greedy industry.

> Without tech companies [...]

Maybe. Tech companies might have some good jobs for a while. But they will continue to transfer their profits to their parent companies in the US (and/or some tax shelter somewhere).

> and data centres

Data centres employ very few people. Pretty much exclusively during construction. Once operational, very little actual labour is required. Mostly maintenance.

> we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid, precarious hospitality jobs that go along with that.

No more poorly paid or precarious than a data centre job for Big Tech, I would imagine.

I agree with the sentiment that Spain (and much of Europe, really) needs a big economic boost beyond tourism. But AI fueled data centres ain't it.

The articles mention agriculture (farmers in opposition of data center for water usage), it seems fair to consider local food production as an important asset for your children.

Data centers, once built, provide negligible numbers of jobs.

> Without tech companies and data centres we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid

Since when was Aragon ever a tourist hotspot? As far as I know (as another "actual" Spain resident), tourists flock to the coastal areas and the islands (and for some reason, Madrid), not to the inner-mainland like Teruel and Zaragoza.

huh, the whole point of this AI is to replace said jobs though.

How would "tech companies and data centres" alleviate the situation? Tech companies typically employ highly specialized staff that are often not even local to the community. The result of inviting tech companies to your country can be seen in Ireland (/Dublin).

Data centres are even worse - they need only a handful of staff members while draining incredible amounts of energy and water.

You live in Spain - why not advocate for boosting the energy sector, better grid infrastructure, more renewables, etc.? This would harness a tangible, sustainable strength of your country within the EU and, considering the blackout last month, is definitely something to work on before any tech company or datacentre can settle in Spain ...

Easier said than done. Running a datacentre at scale is a costly operation with large up front investments. Revamping the cooling is another large cost. Maybe one that will save money in the long run, but still a big investment.

> In reality it is mostly servicing sites like this, ad networks, backing up your iCloud photos, running your bank, etc.

In reality, GPUs slurp a lot of energy, and it would be missing the current situation if you don't think new data centers will include a lot more GPUs than they did just 5 years ago. Not saying the new data centers will mostly be GPUs, but current context surely changed the calculations of what a "modern" data center should contain.

> price and regulate a resource appropriately and this wouldn't happen [...] In every normal place they run a closed circuit

Pricing and regulation doesn't suddenly mean foreign investors won't try to get an already scarce resource allocated to them. And regardless of how closed the circuit is, once the water goes to the data center, it cannot also go to other uses, so the farmer ends up with less water.

Here's a random example of one, current flow 2.16: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?pid=107312153&newest=1&yaw=1.53...