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0 pointsVeserv10mo ago0 comments

Why? It is only a measly 500,000 gallons a day.

That is only ~2,000 m^3/day (~2 acre*foot/day). Even if they exclusively used the most expensive source of water, seawater desalination, that would only be ~800 $/day.

Your average almond tree uses 3-4 acre*foot per year [1]. So the yearly water consumption of the data center is ~200 almond trees. Your average almond tree produces ~50-60 pounds per year [2] and ~4500 pounds per hectare (2.5 acres), so that is the water consumption of a tiny 5 acre almond farm producing ~10,000 pounds of almonds per year.

The internet indicates the wholesale price of almonds is ~2 $/pound, so you can either have a data center or 20,000 $ worth of almonds.

[1] https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-a...

[2] https://wikifarmer.com/library/en/article/almond-tree-harves...

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nimish9mo 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.

VeservOP9mo ago

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.

tharkun__10mo ago

How much is that in "Libraries of congress" worth of water consumption?

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