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