[pjc50]

I'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers?

Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.

Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.

[mathiaspoint]

My parent's hometown blocked data center construction because of concerns about traffic and water consumption.

This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.

Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.

I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.

[Ray20]

> Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.

I even became interested in how much energy is needed to desalinate water by boiling it, taking into account recuperation and everything else.

> Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.

Electricity prices are largely dependent on the need to deliver a steady flow of energy and store it, which are not a concern in the context of desalination water.