Artificial intelligence threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe’s driest regions

[homesweethomemrl@lemmy.world]

well, that's the cost of this amazing new technology that's going to solve everything and change everyone innit.

I mean. Y'know. Someday. Maybe. Probably not though, but we've tried not destroying the earth for it and that didn't work. What does Microsoft or OpenAI have to lose?

[untakenusername@sh.itjust.works]

well they do have a ton of valid use cases for stuff like drug development and training self driving cars and so forth

its not all ai 'art'

and the internet sorta relies on them too for storing websites

[tal@lemmy.today]

Europe consists of a bunch of peninsulas surrounded by ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea

Water volume: 21,700 km³ (1.76×1010 acre⋅ft)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Ocean

Water volume: 3,750,000 km³ (900,000 cu mi)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean

Water volume: 310,410,900 km³ (74,471,500 cu mi)

EDIT: For bonus points, if one is going to expend the waste heat on evaporating seawater anyway:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/desalination-saltwater-brine-mining

In Seawater, Researchers See an Untapped Bounty of Critical Metals

[general_effort@lemmy.world]

The EU has spent a fair bit of money building up compute in Spain. Not really seeing them intervening when someone else pitches in with their own money. Chances are it wouldn't happen without the legal requirements to keep data in Europe, anyway.

[isokiero@sopuli.xyz]

Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There's been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I've also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they'll run just fine even at -30C as long as they're shielded from elements other than temperature.

And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.

[barsoap@lemm.ee]

Supercomputers are a different beast than AI data centres. MareNostrum uses 1.3MW, that's peanuts and easily used up by hot showers, Barcelona has a lot of showers. It's also only the 4th largest EuroHPC computer. Private investors apparently plan to build a Gigawatt worth of compute in Aragon.

[goten@piefed.social]

ai will solve this problem soon

[saleh@feddit.org]

The temperatures needed to boil water are not the temperatures at which to run datacenters.

[bigshammy80@feddit.org]

Is it "great" to have microsoft or amazon data centres in Europe?

I mean, with Trump you're even more dependent on US IT tech, aren't you?

[b0rax@feddit.org]

We are connected right now via multiple data centers.

[tal@lemmy.today]

You don't need to hit boiling levels to evaporate water.

[saleh@feddit.org]

Any increase in temperature, which benefits evaporation, decreases the efficiency of running the data center.

This is the vapor pressure curve for water. Under constant pressure and saturation of the air, the evaporation rate as a function of temperature is proportional to the vapor pressure curve. As you can see it is an exponential relationship.

Now you have to offset that with the energy it takes to pump the water around, the increased costs for equipment that can deal with salt water, the increased costs to deal with flooding risks...

You know what you could do instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_evaporation_pond

All it takes is a flat basin and a dam with a gate to let in water and then block it away. The sun will do the rest.