Comment by jonas21

No, the question was whether "the same size space of apartments" (i.e. apartment buildings occupying the same land area as the datacenter) would use more or less water than the datacenter.

Under reasonable assumptions, the apartments would use more water.

- Google's datacenter complex in the Dalles covers ~190 acres.

- Typical density for apartment buildings is 50 units/acre, meaning you'd have 9,500 units on 190 acres.

- Average household size in the US is 2.5, so the 9,500 units would have a population of 23,750.

- According to the original article, per capita domestic water usage in the U.S. is 82 gallons per day, meaning a total water consumption of 710M gal/yr for the apartments. And this doesn't count the substantial indirect water usage you'd need to support this population.

- The Google datacenter uses 355M gal/yr (per the Oregonian article).

- 710M > 355M

Now, it would be somewhat ridiculous to replace the entire Google datacenter with apartment buildings in a rural town with declining population, but that was the original question...