Comment by nimish
9 months ago
That consumption figure is per acre of almonds. But your point is still valid. In total almonds or other crops like alfalfa consume millions of acre-feet of water a year in a dry state like California while a single data center only consumes ~500-1000.
Indeed, that is my mistake. I misread the denominator of the consumption figure. Luckily the orders of magnitude are so dissimilar that mere factors of 100x do not affect the calculation.
3-4 acre*foot per year per acre of almonds results in the data center consuming ~200 acres of almond. ~4500 pounds per hectare results in ~1800 pounds per acre. So, that would produce about 360,000 pounds of almonds or ~720,000 $ worth of almonds.
That is certainly vastly less economically productive per unit of water consumed compared to a 750,000,000 $ data center which probably has a expected payback period of 10-20 years or about 37,500,000-75,000,000 $ of produced value per year.