Comment by ls612
6 months ago
Of course it’s fake. The datacenters aren’t consuming the water as part of their operation they are using it as a supersized version of a custom loop PC.
I worry though that the fact that people seem to see political upside in claiming this will lead to data center NIMBYism and a future where building more compute will be as hard as building more housing, with all of the follow on effects on prices.
It's not a closed loop though , many use evaporative cooling towers ( wet towers )
But that water remains in the water cycle. With agriculture the water goes into the crops and is then shipped off to other places, exiting the water cycle of its origin.
That's backwards. When data centers evaporate water for cooling, it becomes vapor that blows away to fall as rain somewhere else then it's gone from the local area or its discharged a waste water. Farm water mostly stays put but plants release it back into the local air, excess irrigation soaks into local groundwater, and only a fraction leaves in the harvested crops.
Farmers can reuse the same local water year after year. Data centers need fresh water constantly because their evaporated water doesn't come back.
“But the water cycle” is the dunning-krugerest counter argument of them all. It assumes the reader doesn’t remember 4th grade science class, while misapplying that same basic knowledge.
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The datacenters ARE consuming the water as part of their operation.
A constant growth rate of datacenters will consume water at a fixed rate, though. And the growth rate is more likely to be exponential.