Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.

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deckar01 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.

	▲	deckar01 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.

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linsomniac 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>they are not meaningful users of water.

How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.

See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...

	▲	TeMPOraL 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale. It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
	▲	ordersofmag 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.

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AlotOfReading an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.

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dekhn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).

So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.

	▲	dotancohen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		How do you get the California water to this datacenter? In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.