[briandw]

Water hogging? Show me the data. This is a lie that the socialist continue to peddle. It’s a very sticky idea completely resistant to facts. Data-centers use 48m gallons a day in the USA. Total water consumption is 322 billion a day. So 0.015% of water use. Golf courses use 30x that and Almonds 80x that.

[hootz]

Okay, those are the global stats, but what about local impacts? Water is often a local resource, not a country-wide one, so the impact of a large datacenter will often be much higher around it. For example, we have some datacenters gobbling up 10% of all the water consumption of a town (https://www.waterverge.com/news/data-centers-ai-water-consum...), with most of that coming from potable water supplies. That's considerably higher than the global stat you provided of 0.015%, and that affects the entire town.

That, and also local heat generation. Data centers heat up neighborhoods from miles away. (https://interestingengineering.com/science/data-center-phoen...)

[murderfs]

The total water usage of the largest concentration of datacenters in the world is only using 10% of the water consumption of the county, about half of which is non-potable reclaimed water that would otherwise be dumped into a river [1], and you think this is a bad thing?

1: https://www.loudounwater.org/commercial-customers/reclaimed-...