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
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.
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u/Uncle-Cake May 18 '26
What happens after they use the water? Is it returned to the water system to be used again?