You can drain aquifers faster than they get re-filled. Fresh water is renewable, but it renews relatively slowly in many places.
Months in some places. But in the arid locations, it can take thousands of years for water to go from surface to aquifer.
A lot of these data centers and chip fabs are built in arid places because labor is cheap, taxes are low, and land is cheap. The reason for those three things is that there's not enough freaking water in the first place.
Slurping it up to run digital addiction mills and predatory advertising falls somewhere on a spectrum ranging from just plain stupid to abhorrently immortal.
I agree but then using a volume of water as a measure without provided context is just fearmongering.
Draining oasis in a desert might have much higher impact than one of the thousands of lakes in canada but still, it's a renewable resource. Most of the places suitable for datacenters have plenty of it anyway as datacenters are more suited for colder climates which usually have plenty of water.
Months in some places. But in the arid locations, it can take thousands of years for water to go from surface to aquifer.
A lot of these data centers and chip fabs are built in arid places because labor is cheap, taxes are low, and land is cheap. The reason for those three things is that there's not enough freaking water in the first place.
Slurping it up to run digital addiction mills and predatory advertising falls somewhere on a spectrum ranging from just plain stupid to abhorrently immortal.