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Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

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Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#31

Post by pixxel »

lpln3452 wrote: post #20
deadbabe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that large institutional investors or lenders enforce certain agendas by only giving money to companies that meet certain criteria. Thus companies will posture themselves as meeting those qualities to attract money and investment. It’s an explanation of why so many companies suddenly appeared to go “woke”, or why they did a complete 180 when the political climate changed. Even powerful companies like Ap…

Oh, I didn't know it worked that way. Thank you for the information.

[dead]

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#32

Post by wahnfrieden »

teeray wrote: post #14
xnx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).

> That said stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers That's something of a fallacy of relative privation. When water is scarce, all frivolous uses should be under scrutiny. The others you mention have been well-known for a long time. The current stories simply highlight a new consumer people haven't thought of before.

Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? If 100x current usage levels become a concern, I don't know why people pretend that current usage is not a concern for a tech that many of those same people are projecting to scale.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#33

Post by triceratops »

imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate?

Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#35

Post by Faelon »

imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#36

Post by xhkkffbf »

This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat.

Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#37

Post by triceratops »

harddrivereque wrote: post #29
xnx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or do data centers use evaporative cooling just like power plants? Yes. Not always, but evaporative cooling is much more energy efficient than heat exchange to outside air. That said, stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers like golf courses and agriculture (e.g. to ship alfalfa to the middle east).

The problem with data center water usage is that it is unnecessary from the PR point of view. Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive. For all I know, we could also do just as good without data centers, like we did 20 years ago. With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We coul…

> Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive

"More expensive" means spending more on air conditioning. Ergo more electricity used, higher electricity demand, more natural gas burned and carbon emissions, higher consumer power prices. So a different kind of PR disaster.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#38

Post by weird-eye-issue »

jeffbee wrote: post #28
semiquaver wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty close proxy for how much computation is happening. [citation needed]. See the vastly different power budget and cost of AWS graviton ARM vs x86 compute. Looking even at power use directly is only going to give a very low precision proxy for aggregate compute, with water usage even more indirect.

Counterpoint: you have no factual basis for believing anything about the energy used by various CPUs in EC2, none of which are publicly available parts.

You just proved their point though

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#39

Post by jeffbee »

astroflection wrote: post #24

I am assuming the 7.7 billion gallons(29b liters) a year is all surface water. It better be. It would be hideously irresponsible to use any ground water for cooling their data centers.

or 24,000 acre-feet in the terms that we normally use to speak about water. In other words, basically none.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#40

Post by avalys »

Faelon wrote: post #35
imgabe wrote: post #10

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...

“Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant!
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