Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this?

I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.

The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad.

The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.

Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.

I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.

So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.

I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.

Omen AI just got $31m to solve this problem...

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/omen-ais-plan-to-optimize-...

A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)

This is why datacenters in central texas are desperate to build anywhere in the edwards aquifer... so they can get "free" water from natural springs (already stressed by draught) and dump the effluent into city wastewater systems.

> after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus

Hey where’s that person from yesterday who argued with me over the 1m vs 1cm hole in the boat?

Everyone saying stop talking about data center water use is missing the entire point as this article shows.

[fnord]