AI data center project sucked 29M gallons of water

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	AI data center project sucked 29M gallons of water (tomshardware.com)
	25 points by 2ndorderthought 42 days ago

4 comments

_aavaa_ 42 days ago

> the 29 million gallons were consumed during temporary construction activities, including concrete work, dust control, and site preparation

Misleading title

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yifanl 42 days ago

Is there a AI data center construction process that doesn't involve these costs?

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_aavaa_ 42 days ago

Is there a large scale construction project that doesn’t incur these costs? Is the AI data center substantially worse on these metrics that other comparable projects? Or are we talking about it only because it’s AI-related?

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footydude 42 days ago

> Or are we talking about it only because it’s AI-related?

We're absolutely only talking about it because it's AI.

From about 5 minutes of digging, I found the below which perhaps helps to put the 29m gallons in context.

> The Fayette County Water System has a total production capacity of 22.8 million gallons per day (MGD).

Source: https://fayettega.org/doing-business/global-access-infrastru...

So...keeping things simple and using 30d months:

Using 29M gallons over 15 months = 29,000,000 / (15 * 30) = 64,444 gallons per day avg

Based on 22.8m daily production capacity that's less than 0.3% of the total production capacity per day.

(Happy to be corrected if my napkin maths is wrong / i'm missing something here!)

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2ndorderthought 42 days ago

I think it's important to know the total costs environmentally for these outfits

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_aavaa_ 42 days ago

But what criteria do we use to judge whether these numbers are too high or too low? How do they compare to other construction projects of this size?

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2ndorderthought 41 days ago

By whether or not it is disrupting other users access to the resource like what happened in the article? By how much it effects our very finite water table. Things like that sound reasonable to me

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sfmike 42 days ago

The title doesn't mention a time horizon it states what was used which it was. This is not misleading.

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isawczuk 42 days ago

During the construction, not operating. In scale it's 44 Olympic pools.

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ChrisArchitect 42 days ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079333

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ReptileMan 42 days ago

So not much at all. Lets say enough for growing 4 tonnes of almonds.

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