Comment by jrflo
15 hours ago
What drives me nuts about this whole water consumption discourse, is no one ever asks what happens to the water when it's used- it gets evaporated! It re-enters the water cycle as pure water! It's not like it's getting destroyed or turned into some unusable sludge, it'll just rain back down again in a few weeks.
Obviously, you still shouldn't build datacenters in areas that are locally water-stressed as that will add additional burden to the infrastructure.
At its simplest, it rains more over the ocean than it does over land, so all that fresh water you evaporated is now salty and useless. If you don't believe me just ask ChatGPT. It'll only cost you a bottle of Evian.
> Obviously, you still shouldn't build datacenters in areas that are locally water-stressed as that will add additional burden to the infrastructure.
The problem is that the areas that are locally water-stressed are also the areas where communities are less cohesive (because they ware water-stressed) and have less power to fight back and are therefore the easiest places to build data centers.
This paper goes into what the consumption looks like and even has ideas about how to temper it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499
The fact that a datacenter is evaporating X gallons of water in a period implies that a datacenter is ingesting X gallons of water (if less, the datacenter dries out, if more the datacenter floods) - meaning X gallons are now locked out of the water cycle. Meaning it rains back down and gets slurped back up.
This is under the happy assumption that all used water evaporates into a cloud directly above the source region, which rains back directly.
How much water is contained inside the datacenter at any given moment? That's how much water is taken from circulation by this datacenter. Is it enough to worry?
What drives me nuts about this whole water consumption discourse, is no one ever asks what happens to the water when it's used...
Just because everyone else came to a much different conclusion than you did doesn't mean no one asked. Maybe you might do well to ask as well, and listen to the answer this time.
Yeah, not in the place it was pumped out from, duh!
yeah, why dont the dehydrated cattle and starving children appreciate the global hydrologic cycle
Jesus this is Fox News levels of ignorant.
1. The discourse is indeed idiotic. Data centers use less water than the (usually agriculture) purposes that land has already been zoned for.
2. “It just gets evaporated” is not a good take either. Fresh versus salt water matter, and their distribution matter a lot too.