Comment by ben_w
1 month ago
I'm not trusting the linked blog itself, so I looked up the sources it used. The blog is claiming:
> estimates that data centers in Maricopa County will use 905 million gallons of water in 2025
One reason I don't trust this blog, is that this text links out, but the link itself ends in:
utm_source=chatgpt.com#:~:text=At%20the%20state,annual%20water%20use.
And when I follow through, the actually linked text (on domain circleofblue.org) says:
Walsh’s research at Bluefield indicates that data center water consumption in Arizona in 2025 will be roughly 905 million gallons
Not being an American, I had to look up Maricopa country; according to Wikipedia, it's 62% of the state's total population, so lots, but definitely not all; and according to this other list of data centres, it has most (but still not all) of Arizona's data centers: https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/arizona
Either way, whoever made this blog post, wasn't paying quite close enough attention to the sources for my taste. Don't mind people using ChatGPT as a search engine (it's better than Google these days, after all), but this does feel like a blog that was vibed, not one that was carefully curated.
Now, if the circleofblue.org claim about 905 million gallons is true, I can compare it to the claim on the hopefully-trustworthy arizona.edu domain that "Arizona used 7.0 million acre-feet of water in 2017": https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/arizonas-water-us... and the state population of 7,582,384 and can see this is very close to approximately one acre-foot of water per person per year, but I don't need to be approximated when I can do an exact calculation in Wolfram Alpha and get 300,824 gallons/person/year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=7+million+acre-feet+%2F...
This makes 905 million gallons/year equivalent to 3,008 people, not 30k, but remember this also includes all the other industry, farming, etc.: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28905+million+gallons%...
But the two really important parts here are (1): according to the previously mentioned map of Arizona's data centres and circleofblue.org link, that's for all 108 data centres across Arizona not just one; (2) 102 of the 108 data centres are in Phoenix, which has a population of about 1.6 million and isn't going to notice the impact of 30k, let alone 3k, extra residents.
(But then, can I trust circleofblue.org and datacenters.com? Is anything on the internet trustworthy any more?)
Ok so imagine 3,000 people suddenly appear in the empty lot next door needing water.
Imagine if literally all 108 of the data centres in Arizona moved next door to you at the same time.
*All* 108, *combined*, use the water of 3000 people.
3000 people is less than half of Cambridge Science Park: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cambridge+Science+Park/@52...
In order, I'd be worried about the electricity, the traffic, the policing (because it's suddenly filled with dense high-value equipment), the noise of the cooling systems, the impact on local scenic views, and the likelihood of enough protestors (for all the obvious reasons) to be directly disruptive to locals even when well-behaved.
But water? Nope.
The Tesla Gigafactory in Brandenburg originally called for 1.8 million cubic meters or 475 million gallons, which would have been half of all 108 the data centres in Arizona combined. Of course, then demand for Teslas in Germany went down, so they never actually used that much, but that's the scale difference here: one single (big) factory is on par with half an entire state's worth of DCs.