Data Center Water Usage
Discussions debate the significance of water consumption by data centers and similar facilities, arguing it's often recirculated rather than wasted and negligible compared to agriculture, residential lawns, and other major uses amid water scarcity concerns.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
you forgot that little detail of in the USA we do not have enough clean water to waste in such a manner in the first place.
How many litres of water are you using to do this, that you wouldn't have otherwise used?
Where is this water meme coming from? Surely the water is just pumped around, not actually used up?
They don't even consume it. It sounds like they're measuring water passing through the facility as "use" -- possibly including for electrical generation.Imagine if people complained that the hoover dam used 100% of the Colorado river to power Las Vegas? In reality it uses 0%.
They do limit water consumption actually.
That's not the kind of water use the article is complaining about.
It's as stupid as comparing it with drinking water usage, right?
We don't need this story to care about water usage...
This seems pretty innumerate to me. Just off the top of my head: ordinary people use over an order of magnitude more water in showers and toilets and lawn sprinklers than they drink (let alone the amount of _bottled_ water they drink), and farms in California use an order of magnitude more water than ordinary people and businesses (which is why low flow faucets and the like are not really doing much for California's droughts).
If these folks didn't use the water, what alternate use would it be put to?