Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
Followup: what are the impediments to using, say, seawater instead?
People mentioned corrosion which is true of all sea water systems but in evaporative systems you also have the addition of salt forming on all the evaporative surfaces which can drastically increase corrosion more than normal seawater and cause fouling
So to do this properly you would want an RO system making freshwater before the cooler which at that point it would make more sense to just have a separate company doing desalination.
Salt water is a huge pain to work with. The salt would quickly corrode any cooling systems.
And even for fresh water, you have biofouling to worry about and what to do with the water after you’ve used it, can’t just dump it into the environment untreated.
There are already heat exchanging systems that do this with brackish water already; you don’t need to treat water if all you ate doing to the water is making the water hotter or colder.
While not strictly biofouling, the marine environment can definitely be affected by introducing hotter water where it didn’t exist prior, in and around the outflow pipe. Seaside nuclear power stations that use seawater cooling need to be mindful to diffuse the heated water over a large area, to minimize the ecological impact. Citation: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
I agree that pumping in water at a different temperature can affect the environment. It is just that a lot of people tend to conflate the effluent coming from plants like this as something which needs chemical or other treatment when the issue is thermal only.
Very similar problems arise with desalination plants, which I wrote about here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/14613302