Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?

My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.

But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.

A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)

Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.

We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.

Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.

People are losing their minds in Wisconsin saying proposed data centers will drain lake michigan. I'm not kidding.

If only we could do water-intensive activities in areas where water is abundant and then ship the resulting products to where they are needed...

In a far science fiction future, I could e.g. imagine connecting LLM inference data centers to a global data network instead of always having to drive up to them to ask my prompts.

Agriculture is used to grow _food_.

The problem is that data centers use SO MUCH water... sure we humans let water evaporate, but this is a new source of water "waste" to the tune of nearing 2 billion gallons/year, just in Loudon County Virginia & connected water users [0].

When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.

Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.

Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...

The explanation about chip immersion is wrong though. It's not a water-saving technique, it's for cooling dense racks more rapidly and maybe saving energy. That warm coolant still needs to be cooled before it goes back through the chips, likely the same way, evaporative cooling tower. Air cooling systems also involve a similar fluid loop, just doesn't go into the chips.

"Since the technology uses synthetic fluids, it requires significantly less water than other approaches." This is like saying that a new car radiator uses less water than an old water-based one, like yeah technically it requires water to work but you aren't boiling it away.

It does mention the real ways to use less water too, either chillers (which use way more power) or running in a colder climate.

I’m not a bot, but maybe I was too quick to not inspect my gut response. I guess I’ll look into it more, maybe this can be a learning experience.

FWIW the comment is just at +2 at the moment, I think it is just at the top of the thread because it is recent and has discussion.

> tldr: chip immersion uses less water but is more expensive. Water evaporation is the opposite. Datacenters will use the cheapest they can get away wi

This suggests a simple fix: charge more to the datacenters (not people) for the water, to make the other option competitive.

No need to throw baby with the ... erm, bathwater.