Fuck I hate it when anything uses “water consumed” as a bad thing.
Writing a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
500ml of water is used in a cooling system. This water is not lost in any way, it’s just warmed up and evaporated. Which then falls as rain again.
If you draw more water from a particular area than that area can support it’s a bad thing. Otherwise, this is just a stupid argument made to appeal to emotions rather than logic.
Where I live, our main water source is a lake, and we only even bother closing the weir(a type of dam) that holds the water in come the middle of March, and open it completely again in October. We just just let billions of liters flow directly out to the ocean the rest of the year.
Especially for AI, you don’t need to locate datacenters near population centers at all, the latency doesn’t affect that use case at all. So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water, pretty much anywhere that has a hydro electric dam is a good choice.
Fuck I hate it when anything uses “water consumed” as a bad thing.
Writing a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
500ml of water is used in a cooling system. This water is not lost in any way, it’s just warmed up and evaporated. Which then falls as rain again.
If you draw more water from a particular area than that area can support it’s a bad thing. Otherwise, this is just a stupid argument made to appeal to emotions rather than logic.
Where I live, our main water source is a lake, and we only even bother closing the weir(a type of dam) that holds the water in come the middle of March, and open it completely again in October. We just just let billions of liters flow directly out to the ocean the rest of the year.
Especially for AI, you don’t need to locate datacenters near population centers at all, the latency doesn’t affect that use case at all. So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water, pretty much anywhere that has a hydro electric dam is a good choice.
oh, wow, yeah, evaporated water does fall again as rain 🤔
why didn’t anyone think of this before? so many wars could have been avoided!
finally, a hydrology understander has logged on to explain why water usage isn’t even a problem. thank you for clearing this up!
seriously though
https://www.datacenters.com/news/california-data-centers-under-pressure-to-reduce-water-usage
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-environment-and-nature-oregon-united-states-2385c62f1a87030d344261ef9c76ccda
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html
https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/special-reports/article/11428474/tackling-data-center-water-usage-challenges-amid-historic-droughts-wildfires
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/30/1119938708/data-centers-backbone-of-the-digital-economy-face-water-scarcity-and-climate-ris
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/
Did you even read the second part of my comment before getting mad?