i think this is a pretty good video and also a good summary of how i feel about "AI water use problem" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
for starters, it is not actually clear to me how much evaporative open loop cooling is used in datacenters at all
every cooling solution i am aware of (which is not that many and not in depth because i am not a datacenter cooling expert) is closed loop. why the fuck would you lose your coolant? municipal water is typically not pure enough to prevent fouling, and purifying it is expensive, total loss systems do not make sense to me
You can have a closed loop that exchanges heat with an open loop. This PR video doesn't explicitly say that, but shows the evaporation setup: https://youtu.be/th6jVeaMyxo?t=90 (it also mentions using sea as a heatsink when available).
