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US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

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Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#31

Post by dgellow »

thevinter wrote: post #13

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76…

You have to look at the local level, water isn’t distributed the same way around a country as large as the US. Some regions have no water problems while others have a lot of consumption and competition to get access to it

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#35

Post by shimman »

zachwill wrote: post #16

One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water. It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists. There’s better metrics to make o…

If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs?

Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#36

Post by slibhb »

Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that.

Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#37

Post by zug_zug »

thevinter wrote: post #13

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76…

Good context, but aren't many of your examples simply putting that water back into the ground? Also, where the water is taken from is the key issue. If this was ocean water nobody would care, but if it's Reston, VA that's a local issue.

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#38

Post by tester756 »

paxys wrote: post #25
thevinter wrote: post #13

Irrespective of how this number is calculated, whether is blue/green water etc here is some comparison data for context, since I personally think that hearing big numbers without any point of reference is pointless. Annual withdrawals (2015) - Thermoelectric power: ~48.5 trillion gal - Irrigation: ~43.1 trillion gal - Public supply: ~14.2 trillion gal - Self-supplied industrial: ~5.4 trillion gal - Aquaculture: ~2.76…

Almond farming - ~1.5 trillion gal (1.1 gal per almond)

Holy shit, so much precious water used just for almond?

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#39

Post by oklahomasports »

zug_zug wrote: post #20
RajT88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.

Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.

Completely non responsive

Re: US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

#40

Post by myrmidon »

thedougd wrote: post #5
bell-cot wrote: post #2

Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet. Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert . The latest Federal pla…

I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?

At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground).

Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.

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