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0 pointsimglorp1y ago0 comments

Yes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived.

In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.

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bryanlarsen1y ago

There can be very little difference between taking fresh water from a major river that dumps into the ocean vs taking from the ocean. For example, if you took 0.001% of the flow of the St. Lawrence river and run it through an evaporative cooling tower you're doing very little harm and perhaps benefiting the local ecosystem through increased rainfall. If you took 50% of the flow it'd be a problem, but the St. Lawrence is massive.

People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity.

Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.

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