[AmazingTurtle]

I was wondering "use" means here, as-in.. does it not recirculate? And apparently the answer seems to be: it's circulated/vaporized into the air. It may fall down as rain somewhere else, not necessarily in the local area where the water was withdrawn from, effectively draining the water from the local area at least.

Also, I was wondering, what does 2.5B gallons of water equate to? Here's the answer for curious minds:

> Using EPA’s cited 82 gallons per person per day figure, 2.5B gallons/year equals the annual household water use of about 83,500 people.

I did some further math... If 1bn users world wide leverage AWS services in their daily routine (netflix, whatever, ...), the formula becomes this one:

2.5B gallons/year ÷ 1B users = 2.5 gallons/user/year

> Compared with the EPA-style U.S. household benchmark we used earlier of about 82 gallons/person/day, that would be: > > 0.00685 ÷ 82 ≈ 0.0084%

So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage. Why is this worth a bloomberg article?

[nozzlegear]

> So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage. Why is this worth a bloomberg article?

I live somewhere that's had a lot of interest from companies wanting to put up new data centers (northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota – open farmland basically). The water usage thing is easily the top concern/grievance that people cite in their arguments against data centers.

[rich_sasha]

> So the AWS data centers make up roughly an additional 0.01% of daily water usage.

I suppose this 1bn people are spread around the world, but the water use is extremely concentrated. The few sites of DC might cause real localised issues even if per-global-user number is small.