Ann Vaughan
speaker
778 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Ann Vaughan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The MeatEater Podcast · Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers · 13 Jul 2026
podcast
Literally, they'll run a cooling liquid, which can include water and glycol,
in, you know, over chips and in these tiny tubes that get into bigger tubes and, you know, eventually also need to go up to a, or out to a big set of equipment that cools that water and then it sends it all back to do it all over again.
Got it.
When today's really advanced AI data centers get built
they get filled up with a pretty small amount of water.
Like for example, a Microsoft facility in Wisconsin was filled, I think it's a handful of swimming pools worth of water.
It's about what a car wash would use in a year.
Oh.
Not too much.
People have forgotten how much water other industrial things, you know, factories, steel mill, you know, like any industrial plant uses water, right?
So...
CHIP foundries use a giant amount of water.
So on a relative basis, the data center guys will sometimes say, we're hardly using any water.
But there is a trade-off that they, you know, I think would be smart to just...
upfront acknowledge because the closed-loop cooling is using a lot of new advanced equipment and existing technologies that we've known about that basically are very energy-intensive.
And so that means they draw more power to do that.
And that means that if they are using the output of a thermal power plant that is up the road, that thermal power plant is using a lot of water to cool its facilities and make the power.
And so...
We're kind of trading one problem for another.
Yeah, then they need energy and that needs to be cooled at the power plant.
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