| ▲ | AngryData 2 hours ago | |
It does if that water is being pumped from underground resevoirs that take 100s of years or more to refill then heated up and evaporated away to rain down upon the ocean or run down the Mississippi to the ocean. I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling system maintence. | ||
| ▲ | HDThoreaun 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
This is a good point and I agree it is important to place systems that use a lot of water close to renewable water resources. That being said, the vast majority of non renewable water usage goes to wasteful desert agriculture and there's comparatively very little backlash toward that. It just seems really dishonest to me to complain about datacenter water usage while ignoring the much larger source of the problem. | ||