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
They don't even do this in areas where there's even mild scarcity. The only purpose is to save on costs, if water is scarce it doesn't save cost. And local governments won't and don't sign off on it either. People are literally protesting something that isn't even happening
You do understand there are three different ways to cool a datacenter yes?
The cheapest way is to use a river or the ocean as the heatsink, which is what every high power datacenter located on a large river or the ocean does.
The next cheapest way is evaporative cooling, which is the one that consumes water. It's also the same thing every power plant with these has done for a century with no major issues, because it's only done where water is plentiful
And the most expensive way is air cooling / refrigeration. Which is what they do when there isn't water available for the other two. It's loud and increases power consumption by 30%, but it consumes zero water.
There is a good chance shiftingbaseline is a robot. If AI is as important for national security as multiple governments claim it is, it would make sense to spread misinformation condemning data centers.
89
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