Why on earth do they want water from the national forest when the massive Columbia River is right there!? Is it too expensive to treat the river water? /s
At this moment I just assume by default that those “watchdogs”, “environmentalists”, “nonprofits” are mix of nimby-ists and/or thinly veiled attempts of extracting money
(it’s a nice things you got here. It would be a shame if some rare species of a frog would be found here. A small donation for the great cause/good, of course, would help us to work on ensuring that nobody gets in harms way).
Stupid question: datacenters need water for cooling right? But they don't boil that water, ie it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer? If that is the case does it matter to the city? The warmer water can still be used for agriculture or any other common usage.
I know google fiber kinda flumped, but if they are already doing their own power generation for data centers they might decide to sell that power to the public too. What is really scary is that I foresee a day where these big tech companies will see it is more profitable to serve utilities to people than web services. Then, after they have a monopoly in most areas, they will enshitify it too.
The amount of people here in the comments happily suggesting to let Google use the clean water for their AI datacenters and return dirty water to use in crops is a bit worrying
More people should scrutinize the methodology behind these AI data center water usage reports.
One widely cited Berkeley Lab figure includes the water evaporated from reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams.
Excluding that factor cuts their water usage estimate by more than half.
On AI & water, looks like all US data center usage (not just AI) ranges from 628M gallons a day (counting evaporation from dam reservoirs used for hydro-power) to 200-275M with power but not dam evaporation, to 50M for cooling alone. [0]
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] thread(it’s a nice things you got here. It would be a shame if some rare species of a frog would be found here. A small donation for the great cause/good, of course, would help us to work on ensuring that nobody gets in harms way).
One widely cited Berkeley Lab figure includes the water evaporated from reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams.
Excluding that factor cuts their water usage estimate by more than half.
On AI & water, looks like all US data center usage (not just AI) ranges from 628M gallons a day (counting evaporation from dam reservoirs used for hydro-power) to 200-275M with power but not dam evaporation, to 50M for cooling alone. [0]
So not nothing, but also a lot less than golf.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...