At its simplest, it rains more over the ocean than it does over land, so all that fresh water you evaporated is now salty and useless. If you don't believe me just ask ChatGPT. It'll only cost you a bottle of Evian.

> Obviously, you still shouldn't build datacenters in areas that are locally water-stressed as that will add additional burden to the infrastructure.

The problem is that the areas that are locally water-stressed are also the areas where communities are less cohesive (because they ware water-stressed) and have less power to fight back and are therefore the easiest places to build data centers.

This paper goes into what the consumption looks like and even has ideas about how to temper it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499

The fact that a datacenter is evaporating X gallons of water in a period implies that a datacenter is ingesting X gallons of water (if less, the datacenter dries out, if more the datacenter floods) - meaning X gallons are now locked out of the water cycle. Meaning it rains back down and gets slurped back up.

This is under the happy assumption that all used water evaporates into a cloud directly above the source region, which rains back directly.

What drives me nuts about this whole water consumption discourse, is no one ever asks what happens to the water when it's used...

Just because everyone else came to a much different conclusion than you did doesn't mean no one asked. Maybe you might do well to ask as well, and listen to the answer this time.

Yeah, not in the place it was pumped out from, duh!

yeah, why dont the dehydrated cattle and starving children appreciate the global hydrologic cycle

Jesus this is Fox News levels of ignorant.

1. The discourse is indeed idiotic. Data centers use less water than the (usually agriculture) purposes that land has already been zoned for.

2. “It just gets evaporated” is not a good take either. Fresh versus salt water matter, and their distribution matter a lot too.

It’s all of these things. People want water for humans, not technology of questionable utility. They also don’t want their power bill going up due to dramatically increased demand from the data centers.

Is this a yes-and kind of thing or a no-but? I'm asking because maybe water serves as a good indicator for the other resource consumption issues around data-centers. Most of the water issues are are directly related to the energy and rare-earth issues you're talking about. This paper covers the scope of energy, consumption, and downstream water usage for servers:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499

So yeah, I don't think water is a red herring but more like a canary.

It's astroturfed, as is most memetic outrage that makes no logical sense

It's more tangible for people, if they would give up golf or eat less red meat, it crusade about those activities, they could do more for mother earth

It's almost as if there are some very powerful forces that want to discredit political dissent.