[827a]

Yes: my understanding is that it’s rather common practice to at least make a best-effort estimation of all these secondary impacts.

It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.

[tracker1]

This also tends to include the rainwater that falls on the ground to grow the grass that cattle eat that would fall on the grass anyway, or that the cow farts aren't really more greenhouse emissions than the grass rotting out over the summer anyway. It's distortive.

IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.

I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"

[827a]

> assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop

My understanding is that the closed-loop systems are rather new; like, "we started using these things in 2024 literally because everyone's been moaning about our AI water usage" new. I'd assume that many new constructions are starting to leverage them, but its not 100%, and existing DCs would be slow to upgrade.

[ponow]

Categorical rejection of alternatives is premature without context.