The fact that certain specific data centres are being proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.
Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed
That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.
The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something
The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels
>The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels
This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.
Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger sources of power and distribution for decades, data centers or not.
With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than enough water to feed the DC for decades.
Is it more of a pricing problem? If data centers paid the same for water as I do they’d be far more efficient with it. Likewise for power. Giving sweet deals to these things based on promises of jobs and tax revenue seems a bad idea at this point.
The way they measure water consumption is genuinely unbelievably misleading at best. For example measuring the water evaporated from a dams basin if any hydroelectric power is used.
Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water.
In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15 hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if people started applying any optimization pressure on these useless metrics.
My favourite example is the complaints about “e-waste” because AirPod batteries are not replaceable. Never mind that the batteries make up about half of the weight of the things ro begin with, the entire annual production of AirPods and their cases would barely fill a single shipping container.
No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1).
Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start foaming at the mouth about Apple’s “wasteful practices”.
Apologies, looks like I mis-remembered the numbers from the original debate, the actual number is about 110x 40-foot containers. It can be calculated easily enough from the # shipped, the volume of a charging case, and the volume of a shipping container.
It doesn’t alter the conclusion that much: in the grand scheme of human industrial activity, this is nothing.
I.e.: if AirPods were made by an independent company, that firm would be in the top 50 of the largest corporations in the world!
For example, a comparable sized company would be Coca Cola, which goes through 300,000 tons of aluminium annually for their cans, not to mention oil used for plastic bottles!
Drinking water does not magically appears in the water cycle the next day.
[0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers."
"I took all your money and gambled it away, but don't worry because it wasn't destroyed, it's still circulating in the economy and will come back someday."
A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are redeposited in the winter snowfall.
I’m sure there was some planning commission process involved with the development of these sites. I’m curious if anyone has bothered to look at those meeting minutes to see if there are some material misrepresentation of the water and power needs. I’m going to guess that answer is no.
