Obviously, you still shouldn't build datacenters in areas that are locally water-stressed as that will add additional burden to the infrastructure.
> 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
This is under the happy assumption that all used water evaporates into a cloud directly above the source region, which rains back directly.
Given those considerations I expect Y to be pretty large.
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.
2. “It just gets evaporated” is not a good take either. Fresh versus salt water matter, and their distribution matter a lot too.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499
So yeah, I don't think water is a red herring but more like a canary.
> Making matters worse, many datacenters now in the pipeline in the US are slated for areas already experiencing drought, according to analysis by The Guardian newspaper.
If it's astroturfed it's only because the people complaining don't have enough water to grow natural grass on their lawn. FTFY.
It’s the size of tiny lake. For context, Lake Meade has about 250 square miles of surface area and an average depth of 180 feet.
The reservoir my city of half a million people gets its water from is 15 square miles and 20 feet deep. 2.5 billion gallons is maybe 5% of our reservoir’s total volume.
This headline is textbook fearmongering. They are intentionally misrepresenting the magnitude of water usage to make you fear data centers. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of them, but water usage is not one of them.
The authors of this article are either assuming you’re to dumb to do simple volume conversions or worse, too stupid to do them themselves. I suspect the latter since they use inconsistent units throughout the article. Liters per kWh, cubic meters, gallons, etc.
You don’t hate journalists enough.
This math isn't "mathing".
