re: Video of the massive scale and speed of scaling re AI data centers and it is mind blowing

At 16:15 you can actually see the squirrels running up and down the transmission lines tower. Our ATL substation has gone down twice due to squirrels getting fried.

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I truly believe that eventually it will be like jumping into another real world. I think there will be haptics, it will be indistinguishable.

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Its going to require a lot more than haptics and advancements in headsets to really put folks in another world and be one that they would want to occupy 24/7. Our biology will have to merge with these devices directly. I spend a decent amount of time in VR now and while its amazing and entertaining I cant stand it for more than a few hours. I think we will voluntarily jack into he matrix at some point.....hell we may be in it now.. but we have a ways to go

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What you could easily do is run a refrigeration compressor (something like ammonia which is very common) and use that to chill the water that cools the computers. Or use the ammonia in a finned heat exchanger to directly cool the air for the computer building. It would be especially useful in places like the southeast with a high dew point. It's already well known how to do this. But if you can with a little warmer temperature then a cooling tower is much more efficient for cooling than a refrigeration compressor.

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I'm sure they've never thought about this.

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From what I’ve heard, they’re using 10s of millions gallons/day. I really have no idea why they wouldn’t use some sort of closed loop refrigerant system

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There are two water loops. One is a closed system with something like Nalco or Chemtreat water in them. This water flows to cold plates on the processors and then back to an heat exchanger. On the secondary loop is the water and cooling towers or chillers. Most folks don’t run chillers due to cost.

We install equipment used in this setup for a water recovery system for a lot of our customers. I imagine we will see a lot more of this used in the future.

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Or use the ammonia in a finned heat exchanger to directly cool the air for the computer building.

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This is covered in the video linked in OP, but the actual hardware is often liquid-cooled.

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But if you can with a little warmer temperature then a cooling tower is much more efficient for cooling than a refrigeration compressor.

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Direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems are a lot different than typical process cooling exchangers - you’ve got much smaller channels and less tolerance for plugging or corrosion.

Because of this, you probably aren’t going to directly cool GPU’s with typical cooling water. And if you do, you aren’t going to cycle up (concentrate) that water anywhere near as much as you might in a plant. AFAIK, most (if not all) of these direct-to-chip cooling systems are closed-loop.

Now.. you still need a way to remove heat from the closed loop whether that’s air cooling, chillers, traditional cooling water, or once-through cooling. I find it rather hard to believe that once-through cooling is anywhere near as common as a lot of folks make it out to be. I get that margins aren’t exactly tight for these operations, but water usage always has a cost and presumably they still value saving money like any other business.

I don’t really have time to dive into any studies right now, but I’d be curious to know how much of the reported/estimated water usage for AI data centers is actually from the power generation side.