Why Does the NSA Want to Keep Its Water Usage a Secret?

[Thor_MN]

4. Data centers need cooling. But not like that.

The water used for cooling in a data center is usually for evaporative cooling in the air handling system. The "swamp cooler" effective is used, outside the building to remove heat from the data center. One could get a vague notion of how much cooling was being done from the amount of water consumed, thereby an inkling of how much computing was going on. But safe to say it's a metric shit-ton and a half.

While there are computer systems that use liquid to directly transfer heat away from the circuit boards, that is a closed system and doesn't consume water on a ongoing basis. The system in your picture is like a car radiator, transferring heat away from the engine to the radiator, where the heat is dissipated to the air, then the cooled water is sent back to the engine. Put thousands of those in the same room and even though you have water cooled systems, you will be melting the chips in short order.