this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center "uses" water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water "use up" the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn't it?
Because that costs money. It's really that simple.
In many states with functioning infrastructure, a property like this that's using that much water, would be required to build and maintain their own treatment plant to cover it.
But we've got regulatory capture, so... Good luck with that one.
They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.
Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.
It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.
It’s closed loop.
There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.
The reason is cost
The problem isn't about the cooling systems "using" the water in the sense that the water "dissapears" from the water cycle per-se. The problem is that when a Data Center is built, the water that the population of that zone used, is mostly diverted from them to the data center, where it is evaporated and thus the population have access to less and less water.
Evaporated is ‘used’. It’s arguably more ‘used’ than it is when it goes down the sewer to local wastewater treatment, as that water is often put back into groundwater through infiltration fields. Depleting aquifers is the main concern of data center water usage.
evaporation is also part of the water cycle
I would also like to know the answer to this.
I have a water-cooled PC and I only add water to it about once a year when the reservoir is around 2/3 full. My loop is water-tight, not air-tight, so water is slowly lost to evaporation.
I would think enterprise loops would be air-tight but perhaps the cost of implementing that is less than paying for water to be added
I believe it evaporates