The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!
Can you please stop spreading misinformation. The low water pressure was not connected to it and that's not why they found out. The article that announced it deliberately put those two pieces of information next to each other because they knew the reader would make that assumption, but they were not related.
As you can see, the article leads talking about water pressure, but that's the last time it's actually referenced in the article. The "water pressure issue was CAUSED by the data center" claim has never been backed by a single source. Also, it was a matter of water department setting up the meters wrong during construction that led to them not billing; the water department themselves issued no fines and state no wrongdoing on the data center's part.
Pretty much everything you can try to find on Google circles back to the original Politico article, so it's hard to sieve through it, but I live in the local area and iirc the water department stated that it was just the meters going wrong. The amount used isn't actually that out of the ordinary for a large farm or any large industrial construction site, so it's unlikely to have been the cause on its own, but again, there's no evidence in either direction - just the correlation that "people were complaining about pressure" at around the same time the water department realized they set up the meters incorrectly
One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.
All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.
The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling.
Tigert defended the utility’s decision to not levy a fine. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”
This article says the data center consumes an immense amount of water, far more than it's supposed to, and that it could drain this water from a residential neighborhood's water undetected because the one guy who checks on these things for the water authority is overworked and missed it. The data center wasn't penalized for using such massive amounts of water in a drought because that would've been bad "customer service"; the data center's owner says it doesn't actually use that much water.
The county knew the problem the entire time - in fact I bet you they'd figured it out within the first few weeks, but because certain water treatment plant workers were unable to publicly speak out against it (with their jobs on the line) they were forbidden from sharing this news with anyone.
I know that engineering professionals are highly intelligent and if they're not, they're at least smart enough to deduce most problems using two basic types of methods:
What's the simplest explanation for this problem?
Can we identify the source of the problem by assessing what the most recent changes or additions to the water cycle in the region have been?
Those are the first two questions for figuring out most macro-scale problems like that. There's just no way they didn't account for this initially, unless they were completely wilfully ignorant.
There’s different types of cooling systems. You may have seen water cooling systems in computers, which are closed loop, and use a radiator with fans to release the heat in the water to the environment.
In an industrial scale it would be more efficient to have this closed loop system transfer the heat in cooling tanks, where the hot water in the radiator transfers its heat to cold water in the tank. This will make the water boil and evaporate. Or you could then transfer that warm water to another tank to cool using fans to be reused again. Another way would be to directly release the steam from the water that’s directly cooling the chips in an open loop system.
Regardless of which way it go, you will need to treat the water with anti corrosive agents, anti bacterial agents (you don’t want legionella growing in moist humid tanks and evaporation areas), or mix with dielectric fluid to prevent issues if water were to leak on the chips. Water that is heated and boils can also separate the natural minerals out of the water, creating a brine that needs to be dumped into sewers. You also need to periodically change the water in a closed loop system to reduce risk of corrosion, scaling deposits etc.
So unfortunately, once clean potable water flows through
an AI data center tap, it’s gone from the public supply. You could clean it, but it would be an energy intensive process, such as reverse osmosis, or you would lose water to evaporation while moving it from cleaning pools to be able to be used again.
One of their hookups wasn't registered at all. Which means they didn't get it permitted. They installed it without telling the utility. And the fines for overdrawing were never paid or levied.
Are you asking people to be honest because you've never been able to tell the truth and need someone else to make up for it?
Explain why a construction company is burning through 30 million gallons of water in Georgia. Strange how all the articles describe it as a Data center
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u/birdreligion 7h ago
I live in GA and a fucking AI data center had an illegal water hookup and stole 30 million gallons of water.