I'd like to see that compared to Total us water consumption for animal agriculture.
Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
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Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#12i find the climate/environment concern around AI so clearly performative and poorly calibrated that it actively angers me. moral panics are weird
Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#132.5 billion gallons per year. The US uses about 2 billion gallons of water per day on golf courses.
A lot of the golf courses around here use reclaimed water (treated effluent). Hopefully data centers aren't using potable water.
Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#14> 2.5 billion gallons of water worldwide last year, or about 5% of the amount metro Seattle consumes annually That doesn't seem like that much, really. The Seattle metro area isn't huge; that consumption is only 0.7% of New York's, and Amazon runs the largest network of data centers in the world.
Another data point.
California pistachios consume about 500–600 billion gallons of water per year.
Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#152.5 billion gallons per year. The US uses about 2 billion gallons of water per day on golf courses.
Citation?
An industry report from 2012 puts water use for US golf courses at around 2B gallons of water/day [0].
It's possible they've gotten more efficient in the past 14 years, but it's also possible there are more golf courses today. I haven't looked into it.
[0]: https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdfRe: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#16If measured the same way the sun uses about as much water as 60,000,000 large data centers.
Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#17Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#18The entire environmental argument against data centers is largely bullshit.
Sure, they shouldn’t be powered by gas or coal. And the local effects are significant.
But the macro environmental effects are minor and the local effects can be resolved with the most trivial regulations.
Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#19Re: Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
#20i find the climate/environment concern around AI so clearly performative and poorly calibrated that it actively angers me. moral panics are weird
I don’t think it’s performative. That seems really uncharitable. Seems like most “performative“ accusations are.
I think a ton of people were REALLY misinformed about how much water AI data centers use. I know I was at one point.
Now there may be people pushing that narrative still on purpose because it clearly works. But I don’t think the average person who uses that talking point is doing anything other than expressing a concern based on the (terrible) information they got somewhere.