[teeray]

> That said stories about data center water use are a distraction from much bigger water consumers

That's something of a fallacy of relative privation. When water is scarce, all frivolous uses should be under scrutiny. The others you mention have been well-known for a long time. The current stories simply highlight a new consumer people haven't thought of before.

[Romario77]

I don't think it's a fallacy, it's much easier to optimize water usage for something that much larger.

Agriculture uses about 70% of all freshwater while datacenters are less than 0.5%

Some leaky channel will cost more than all the datacenters.

[wahnfrieden]

Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment? If 100x current usage levels become a concern, I don't know why people pretend that current usage is not a concern for a tech that many of those same people are projecting to scale.

[neoromantique]

>Also - Will data center water usage remain "negligible" if AI succeeds at wide adoption and scales to 100x current deployment?

Yes.