Why do datacenters continuously use more water instead of recycling the same water in a closed loop system?

Question

Why do datacenters continuously use more water instead of recycling the same water in a closed loop system?

In: 72

Answer 1

They’re not *using up* the water. They’re using it to cool their machines, and returning it to the environment slightly warmer than it was before. Here’s an example of a relatively modern datacenter cooling setup — not the newest (it’s from ~10 years ago), but one that uses seawater, which is somewhat unusual.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/googles-finland-data-center-pioneers-new-seawater-cooling/

Google’s Finland datacenter takes in cold seawater and uses it to cool the fresh water that’s then used to cool the computers. They then mix the slightly-warmed seawater with other cold seawater before returning it to the ocean.