AOC with jar of data center treated drink water

[DoBW]

AOC: This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T18:00:41.548Z

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[UpInArms]

2. Am going to a local hearing

Next Tuesday because they want to build one out in rural northwest Missouri…

We have a huge water issue out here and I cannot see anything good coming from this.

[Passages]

3. Good for you. This is dangerous territory, the water in those bottles was outrageous.

[lapfog_1]

4. Ok, I have built water chilled data centers in the past

The water chilled systems will not do anything to the water, and, in fact, that water she showed would never go into or come out of a water chilled Data center.

Most such systems draw water in from city supply ( purified, filtered, drinking water from rivers or wells ), further filter it, and run it through glorified gaming computer cooling system, only open loop not closed. The water exits the data center to a evaporate cooling tower where the waste heat is placed ( along with a lot of water ) into the atmosphere. Nothing is added to the water other than heat.

More modern systems are using closed loop chillers, where the liquid ( usually not exactly water, I've seen Fluorinert, mineral oil, and treated water ) is used to bring heat away from components ( CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, SSDs, DIMMs ) to an inside the rack or possibly end of a row heat exchange, that in turn, often uses water again but this time the heat is exchanged outside the data center in essentially a large radiator ( just like a car engine ) with fans blowing air through a mass of copper tubing to chill the water. Some are now sending the heat into the ground using large ground loops of conductive metal. All you need is a temperature that is sufficiently lower than what the chips produce to keep them cold enough to operate ( at no time is the water or other liquid actually "cold" ).

My guess is that what has happened in the samples she is showing is that the well water source is insufficient to meet the demands of both the community and the data center, thus causing a lot of muck to sucked in at the well head to dirty up the water and insufficient filtering is done to keep it from entering the city water. The solution is to locate the data center someplace else ( in my humble opinion, Canada... with a few large nuke plants to power everything ) and / or adopt one of the newer and more expensive closed loop systems ( thus taking no additional water other than what was needed to fill the outermost radiator one time, with top offs every now and then ).

The data center is at fault, but the cause is an indirect cause.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/v2/t:20,l:0,cw:1000,ch:562,q:80,w:1000/pXSEzPwmujJdvww23qcx7.jpg

This is a Cray 2 supercomputer from 1990 ( i.e. one of MY supercomputers actually - at NASA ). The computer was swimming in Fluorinert, an inert liquid invented by 3M ), the blue tubes in the front is where the liquid was drained if you ever had to open the computer up to repair something. For those who think we don't need these things... This Cray 2 was the machine that first extrapolated what would happen to the earth from carbon emissions. Not just a general "global warming" but models that predicted where and what the consequences would be...