[Aurornis]

It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now.

Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.

[axus]

If they use so little water and power, why aren't they being built in the empty office buildings? Seems like commercial real estate was made for ... commercial activity.

[fxwin]

Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms)

Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"

[sroussey]

Water usage for a data center is nowhere near any agricultural use (which is subsidized in California so they aren’t incentivized to change much). Data centers don’t need water at all. It’s just the municipality offering cheaper way to cool by offering water cheaper than power for cooling.

[paulhebert]

Yes but people need food in order to live

(I think golf courses - and some pools - are quite wasteful and would support tax incentives around them.)

[yellowapple]

You don't specifically need beef or almonds in order to live. Even small reductions in the consumption of either would entirely offset datacenter water use.

[sroussey]

Then subsidize food directly rather than via water.

[vidarh]

Traditionally they have been. Several data centres in London are colocated in office buildings for example. I used to manage servers in one that most tenants wouldn't even have known about.

AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.

The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.

But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.

[rick_dalton]

This makes no sense? How is one even correlated with the other? Data centers obviously have much different requirements than office buildings for people. On a very small scale this works but not on a larger scale.

[sroussey]

The data centers in L.A. are in old bank buildings. I used to locate my servers at One Wilshire.

Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.

[yellowapple]

A lot of datacenters are built in / under / adjacent to office buildings.

[raychis]

I wonder if we made tech billionaires choose between keeping their golf courses or building more AI data centres what they would go for.