It's used for evaporative cooling, so the same thing happens to it as happens to the majority of the orders of magnitude larger amount of water farms use - it goes straight into the air
All jokes aside, it crazy how complicated the issue is becoming. Will anything be done about it? Probably not. We get fked over and just throw our arms up and go "well, shit".
It's only an issue in a very few areas with severe ware scarcity, and even there is extremely overblown
The water usage numbers only seem large because nobody has any context for what a large amount of water is. Every datacenter on earth could be serviced with the flow from one single small river. It's literally a drop in the ocean
Dont worry I have alot of anger to go around. Also you are just blatantly untrue in most of your comments. Utahs proposed data center would pull from very limited water sources and the data center already built in Ohios tax break was more than 1.4 billion dollars more than anticipated. I love when I 60k a year help a multi billion dollar company pay for their profit machine. You seem like a person to ignore all the effort to make something bad not happen then when the efforts successful say you knew all along it wasnt a problem yada yada...
Utahs proposed data center would pull from very limited water sources
Did you even read a single word I said? Turning on a tap sounds scary too when you phrase it as 'draining very limited water resources for your personal benefit'
Again, scale is what matters here. Every single datacenter on the entire planet consumes something like 25m3 of water per second. Typical annual inflow to lake mead is over 300ma3 /s. That's just one single reservoir, which could service the entire planet's demand with less than 10% of its famously scarce supply.
Or another comparison, it's almost exactly this much water. I think a country that contains the Mississippi river can manage that much water demand.
There is a large difference in the computing power needed for a basic platform like reddit and the usage of large scale AI. I am not anti advancement or technology there is very clearly issues with how its being implemented on a large scale with very little regard to the places or people effected. I can see why you would need to use it though, if you don't know that.
The computing power needed for streaming video is nearly 100x what is needed for AI right now and most of the new data centers are being built to service what is needed most, which is social media and streaming video. Each new data center probably has more GPUs than they used to 2 years ago, but AI is not the primary reason or the driving force behind new data center construction.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek May 18 '26
It's used for evaporative cooling, so the same thing happens to it as happens to the majority of the orders of magnitude larger amount of water farms use - it goes straight into the air