Data centers don't use much water on the scale of things. The numbers look big in isolation, but most people have no idea how much water a country really needs and isolating the numbers makes data centers look bad.

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wholinator2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But aren't they trying to build data centers outside of smaller localities, where they do exist somewhat in isolation? Water cannot just be transported thousands of miles, water itself exists in isolated pockets. Straining the water resources of towns is a problem! You can't just say "the US is big so if you look at the maximum possible widest numbers, it looks small". You have to look at the actual human impact. I think data centers look bad because of the human impacts that I've seen, not some highly abstracted spreadsheet.

	▲	jeffbee 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Water is a locally isolated resource, but again these guys aren't dumb. Nearly all of the water impacts from data centers that I have seen in the news are imaginary. Most actual large-scale facilities have been built in places where water is so abundant it constitutes a natural hazard. In other places, the data centers exist alongside other much larger water consumers, which in my mind tends to absolve them. For example, one of the most objectionable (IMHO) data center sites is Phoenix, but all of the data centers in the area use something like 1% of the water evaporated by the local nuclear power station, not to mention golf courses and agriculture, so it seems weird to complain about the data centers.

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jeffbee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely. It's tiring to squeeze all the facts into every post, though.