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There is an honest way to count and that is to count the water directly used by the person or process in question. There are many other ways to count to make big scary number for clickbait article. I suppose we could also count all the water used by data center employees to take showers as "data center water usage" but that is dishonest. Those are people who exist and they are going to take showers whether they work at the data center or not.

Likewise, the power company is going to generate electricity regardless of whether a data center is there or not. The power company has various means of generating electricity available which use more or less water. The amount of water used in generating electricity is attributed to the power company, not the data center.

[iepathos]

Kind of surprised I have to point this out. Power companies do not generate the same amount of power regardless of whether that power would be consumed on their grid or not. They increase generation based on demand. Whether that power comes from high water consumption generation is based on location which determines which power sources are available in the local grid. A major part of why indirect water consumption from power generation is included in the standard WUEsource - water usage effectiveness metric - is because it makes it clear what the impact will be when assessing data center location and size. In other words, it's important to choose locations near power generation that doesn't consume water heavily. Yes, the amount of water used in generating electricity and the efficiency there is controlled power companies choices for power generation at their locations. Data centers control the location they are built in and without an estimate of indirect water usage they cannot strategize locations with lower environmental impact.

Contrary to your belief that it is about clickbait, it's actually just about how to accurately evaluate environmental impact of data centers backed by science and basic logic.

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A power company builds a generation plant of a certain size. That plant is going to run whether there is a data center or not. Maybe there is some incremental additional water usage if it is running at 85% capacity instead of 75% capacity but this is probably marginal compared to the plant running or not running at all.

Depending on the method of power generation, it might also need a certain consistent base load to run most efficiently, so adding in a data center that will be a consistent load running 24/7 could actually increase the efficiency.