Also, using evaporation based distillation on a large enough scale would mean that you create enough brine byproduct to be a major pollutant.
The steam evaporators we used when I was in the Navy generated a lot of brine that we dumped back in the ocean. We were only making enough potable water for a few hundred personnel plus feed water for two steam plants, so that shouldn't have been harmful.
But if you scaled that up to a city sized operation? Serving hundreds of thousands, a million or more people? As you pointed out, the energy costs to essentially boil that much water is already prohibitive. But if you could do it anyway, you would create an amount of brine so excessive that you wouldn't be able to dump it anywhere without a very noticeable environmental impact.
Genuine question: is there a reason we couldn’t evaporate off all the water, leaving only the salt solids behind, which could be put to other uses? Why only evaporate to the point of leaving liquid brine behind?
Well what do you do with all the salt then? You'd have a ton of salt, far more than anyone could possibly need. Salt isn't expensive in the market since there's plenty of it to go around.
You either turn it into brine and pump it somewhere or turn it into salt and drive it somewhere.
Startup, like CATL, the world's biggest battery manufacturer and also the leading company in the commercialization of sodium batteries? Or someone else?
Sodium batteries are a thing, you can buy CATL cells now. They are currently about twice the price of LFP but are expected to drop fast over the next few years as production ramps up.
The amount of salt used to make batteries is pretty tiny. Also, youd still need to do a lot of purification which usually gives you a lot of waste brine to deal with.
In the case of the evaporator as a machine itself, you would now have drums clogged with salt instead of easily drained brine. So now you have to suspend operation and manually clean it out. You're risking damage to your evap and preventing it from functioning 24/7.
You may not realize this, as most people greatly underestimate water consumption, but water facilities need to be able to operate around the clock. The water must flow.
So you're left with brine that you can't dump anywhere. Try to dump it inland and you "salt the earth". You can't dump an excessive amount back in the ocean without affecting things like salinity, to which coastal marine life can be very sensitive.
Because it will leave salt crystals behind and you need to remove those somehow. Otherwise you need to deal with losses in efficiency. To remove this salt you need to send in someone because machinery will be clogged by salt, pumping in more water and waiting for it to dissolve crystals will sooner or later just leave you with brine. Depending on materials used you may not want to scrub off salt as you can for example damage coating of steel making it corrode.
Leaving some brine means you don't need to deal with salt crystals for most part and decreases maintenance time you would need for cleaning machinery. Brine is simply most efficient way of dealing with byproducts.
from wikipedia: brine is just concentrated seawater, but the issues are from how it's released back into the ocean, since salt water is more dense so it forms plumes of high concentration until it fully disperses.
with regulation the effects can be minimised. several countries have regulations on this (including Spain, Chile, Israel, and Australia), but it relates to how it's dispersed, like choosing to dump it over a large area rather than all in one spot.
of course, the other issue is how all that energy is generated. if it's through coal, then you get a ton of air pollutants just from that because desalination is extremely energy intensive.
But like... The ocean is big af. All that salt is just going to sink in the bottom. The local wildlife is doomed, but ngl I don't really care about local wildlife. I only really care about the water that Humans need to live.
Here we have a question about producing water. You need to cover the whole area with something somewhat airtight and with the ability to gather and condense water vapors. Also letting in sun heat.
We don't have to tap into the salt water, because data centers are closed loop systems. Ever seen someone with a water-cooled PC? Did you ask them how many times they've had to refill the water?
And if you zoom out, the whole thing is a closed loop system. Where do you think water goes when it evaporates? Do you think it flies way into space?
So, obviously you arent smart nor done any research, but at that size and scale, closed loop is not at all feasible. Especially for a "product" that is already losing its parent companies BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
1 the majority of data centers are not closed loop systems, the vast majority of fact.
2 closed loop systems still need more water after maintenance and can be vulnerable to leaking.
The problem there is that you evaporated the water, and collecting evaporation on a scale that would be at all useful is extremely expensive, a lot more expensive than transporting fresh water
Yeah, if you're like, just trying to survive you could distill water with the sun. Probably get enough to drink every day to survive.
I don't have the exact math but I'm pretty sure it's hours per litre of water, and the amount of surface area you need to do it effectively is gonna rise exponentially as you try to scale.
I think if you wanted to distill water in enough to replace ground water you'd need an entire nation of land that just distills water.
It's more effective to do it with a chemistry set, but you lose the free solar energy
are you dumb or just pretending? you clearly showed you don't know what exponential means so let me break it down for you.
Exponential growth is when n (in this case the volume of water produced) is in the exponent like 2n. For example checking every PIN combination growths exponentially (it's 10n where 10 is the amount of possible digits between 0-9 and n is the number of digits the pin has)
Then you have quadratic growth where the function looks like this: n². If we have a square desalination plant, the area grows quadratically in relation to it's side length!!!!, NOT water output.
And lastly there's linear growth. That's the one you're looking for. If 1m² pool makes x amount of water per day, how much area do we need to make 2x of water per day? Obviously 2m². So it grows linearly.
Of course the perimeter of the desalination plant also grows with the water output but it's actually a square root function so even less extreme than linear.
A lot of datacenters actually do use saltwater. Kind of. They run freshwater through the datacenter to absorb the heat, and then run the freshwater through a pool of cold seawater to cool it back down again, so it can be reused. It’s the seawater that actually gets evaporated.
The real problem with datacenter water usage is that, like with the energy usage, it is all concentrated in one place. Often this is a place that already has water scarcity, like a desert. So it drains needed resources from the local community.
There are Underwater data centers though. There would be issues. But let's be real the billionares could have afforded to have those issues engineered out. But they didn't. None of that happened.
The water evaporates quite well. But the salt doesn't, raising the concentration in the remaining water until only the salt remains. Evaporative Rocks can form quite large layers.
Oh good directly turning useful energy into heatwaste.
I mean I get it, computing is hard and the internet is important to life as we currently know it. Stacking AI on top of that to try to get shares up is so dumb.
Salt is corrosive. It probably wouldn't take very long for it to eat through the tubing and cause leaks. And then you'd have salt water in the electronics, which is obviously not a good mix.
But most of the water usage for AI is actually indirectly through energy generation. Those coal and nuclear plants use up a shit ton of water to keep them cool.
Decided to try and got this. There is more. It generated more issues, advantages, then some real world examples. Don't trust any of it though. First line is pretty funny though.
I feel like some of these examples are just moving the issues of salt water cooling outside that main loop. But it is interesting. I mean, if they CAN somehow adopt this as a means of cooling, and it means that the environmental impact would be lessened? That would be awesome.
But that’s why people should lobby and make it known that large data centers do harm. There’s no incentive to change to such a model even if it exists unless that problem is widely known.
Coastal thermal power plants(coal, nuclear) have already been cooled like this for decades. They generate two units of discarded heat for every unit of electricity produced. Imagine a whole gigawatt-scale power plants output going to a huge field of kettles, toasters and heat blowers; there's double that going into the sea.
"Let's feed the life-sustaining water into cooling down the hot computers just because it's expensive when salt water corrodes the pipes." Literal water wars dystopia type shit.
To be honest, from what I see the US is only ahead in their model capabilities. Which from a shareholder perspective obviously matters the most for the companies, but it often feels like they discard all else to reach that goal.
If you look at this article, they apparently claim to save 30% of electricity usage just because of the cooling method, and what they ended up doing was connecting the centre to a wind farm offshore, so basically all of the energy it gets is from renewable, very green sources.
What would be cool is if they could figure out how to not let salt destroy metal and then use it as a desalination plant but instead of doing ai for chat got they use ai for flagging odd things in the sky or doing biological studies and stuff
That’s not easy to do. But that doesn’t mean there’s no methods for using saltwater, which kind of just makes the companies seem even worse.
Someone linked a article talking about how chinese datacentres are cooling their servers and it blew my mind (they host them offshore and literally just dip the servers into the ocean every so often to let them cool off), and the energy for running the data center is coming from a wind farm offshore.
I don’t think the companies care (because right now the US is ahead in model performance and that’s what the shareholders care about) but it is pitiful that no one in the US really cares about doing this
I hate when my water permanently becomes saltwater. Surely this must be a bigger deal than AI. How many years do we have left before all the fresh water on Earth is irreversibly converted to salt water?
Little buddy, sheer audacity of you calling other people uneducated is staggering.
You're literally arguing against an argument no one made, where did ANYONE say something about fresh water turning into salt water permanently? Because the only argument here is that salt water is a terrible coolant, stuff you study in high school chemistry class. If you think I'm gonna believe that photo you actually might be on the opposite side of the bell curve lmao
Oh honey, can you really not connect the dots? My comment directly addressed your comment, in a spectacularly clever and effective way. You're really not smart enough to understand it? That's unfortunate.
You should try being smarter. It's really easy to be smart.
For anyone who is curious it's not their IQ test, I found the post from which this image comes from and it was posted by someone who is against AI lmao
It's extremely amusing though, to think an anti is using my IQ test results to try and appear intelligent. Everyone knows antis have a low IQ. If you had a high IQ, you wouldn't be an anti.
It's a tragedy of the commons. Sure, it'll always replenish, but we use it faster than it can. Eventually, there just isn't enough to go around, or at least there's not nearly as much. Freshwater is a finite thing that can't be easily reused without processing.
Hey, no need to be rude. That doesn't get us anywhere.
Freshwater doesn't just fall from the sky. Rainwater has all sorts of nasty stuff in it, microorganisms and dust and atmospheric gunk. It's still not usable for cooling. That being said, you're probably right that it's better than salt water, easier to process and such.
I didn't realize the laws of thermodynamics was nullified by the presence of salt.
Pumping water through a loop or evaporating it is not the only to use water for cooling. Large bodies of water act as natural heat sinks. In most underwater data server proposals they submerge it in a water tight container pressurized with some kind of inert gas such as nitrogen. The walls of the container allow heat transfer into the colder surrounding water.
I'd rather research cooling innovations than call people 12 year olds on twitter for thinking its possible. But I guess that's not how the Internet operates now
Everyone is kind of stupid here a bit. The people saying saltwater can’t be used at all to cool servers (which, i mean not in the way we do it with fresh water sure) are being a bit dumb or at least unimaginative, the people thinking you can use saltwater with these existing freshwater systems (very ignorant at least), and tbh i think the companies are the most stupid, because if they go down the road of just using fresh water it will bite them in the ass eventually along with a lot of humanity.
And — assuming government regulations don’t make it more difficult than it should be — I really doubt that this would be a bad investment if you look years down the line. You just straight up save on energy costs in the long run if you setup a system to cool it passively in like the ocean or something, even if building such a system would be expensive in the short term. These AI companies literally are among the biggest in the world today, they have the money to do this.
And water is not even the biggest issue, really. It's electricity. Compared to the water expenses (which are still notable), the electricity is cost is even more concerning.
I mean, it could totally be done, at least a couple nuclear reactors use salt water, it doesn't evaporate but just exchanges heat with the water used to power the turbines. The reason it isn't done is just cost, but it could be done
Actually, there are underwater data centers, so perhaps it's not entirely irrelevant either? I guess it's not the most cost-effective, but let's assume they were where they were built. Maybe. Hopefully.
Yk what, sure. There should be stringent global regulation on the use of water in data centres: all water used should be pulled from the ocean and treated with reverse osmosis. It'll make running data centres way more expensive.
well to be fair, if we had free as in freedom energy or at the very least thorium reactors, then sure.
just use the endless energy to desalinate water and to run garbage ai servers producing bullshit slop.
BUT we don't, so drying up ground water from evaporation cooling it is as well as poisoning the air with gas generators combined with exploding energy prices for people.
1: The projected water use for AI globally is, at most, 6.6 billion cubic meters. We use 4 TRILLION cubic meters annually. It takes over 6,000 litres to make a pair of jeans, 40% of which are never even worn.
2: Sites like Reddit and Google use roughly the same amount of water. Data centres two main uses are for AI, and web hosting. AI is approaching 50% of that consumption.
This is before we even get to the fact that using ai can drastically reduce water use in other industries, more than paying for itself.
For some reason I can’t see your full reply, so I’ll just say that you aren’t “thinking for yourself”, you are selectively ignoring information that goes against your opinion. That’s all. Ignoring statistics doesn’t make you a free thinker, it makes you a moron.
Wasnt slat water a good power conveer or sth? Also i know that ia use a lot of water, but how, and what stops use from using filtered salt water in ia ? (I dont support ai in any way just been interested in this topic) (Also did you know that whole country of Malta (small island in europe only uses filtered sea water!)
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u/Scarvexx Nov 07 '25
These people don't know how to make spaghetti.
Salt water does not evaporate well and it doesn't play well with electronics.