How much water was used by forests in regular transpiration?
Just for sake of saying, worldwide, golf courses use between 2.5 billion and 5 billion gallons of water PER DAY.
Can we get rid of amazon and golf courses?
Golf courses get the extra sweet sauce of maybe an average of about 10 to 30 metric tons of pesticide a day, and then there is the fertilizer…
There are a lot of questions in this comments section about how data centers use water and how they are cooled.
At least some of this information is available at resources like these:
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres
It appears they that are using both fresh/potable water and grey water where available and that not all of a data centers water consumption is to do with cooling of servers. There’s also electricity generation and extraneous water usage on site.
Amazon’s AWS is at least no small portion of the internets infrastructure (30% of web infrastructure world wide). So I was cautious about whether this total was for all of their data centers or just for ones that run AI.
I’ve read three articles so far reporting on this and none of them make it clear Amazon is reporting their total water usage for all their data centers world wide (I suspect it’s this one), or if they specify the water usage of AI data centers.
My understanding is that a data center can be open loop or closed loop. Closed loop is like a water cooling pc with a radiator and you have to cool the water down to ambient temps. Open loop (or semi open loop) is more common which involves dumping hot water into the local sewer system or local waterways.
More data centers than you expect just dump the water rather than cool it down and reuse it.
AFAIK most datacenters use evaporative cooling so water simply evaporate and system has to be filled up again, other systems that are dumping water have issue with all kind of additives like anti corrosion, residual etc and water shouldn’t be just dumped but go through wastewater treatment
Yeah and I have little confidence the proper treatment will happen always.
Well it doesn’t because obviously it cost money, just recently there was a scandal with Musk collosus datacenter where they straight dumping toxic wastewater into neighborhood, because well, water treatment centre they’ve planned is too expensive
www.thecooldown.com/green-business/xai-water-recycling-facility-memphis-indefinitely-paused/
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-environmental-regulations
It seems like all of Musk’s companies have a habit of illegal dumping.
Or polluting black neighborhoods.
How can you be so cruel and ask for waste water treatment? That poor guy barely gets by. He isn’t even a trillionaire yet!
Oh lord, the expenses! 😭
Depends on how you define a data center, but you mean the large single purpose data centers that have been hastily built investor bait over the last 5-8 years, then yes, most of those use the evaporative cooling towers that concentrate waste products either already in the water, or added to prevent corrosion because they cheaped out on the plumbing, and then dumps that back into the local water source.
Fair. You are probably correct about dumping into waterways. But I know that a substantial amount of warm water is dumped into local wastewater processing.
Yeah as far as I was able to find out even closed loop systems have to be regularly bleed out to control mineral buildup. People argue about closed loop systems as it’s some kind of perpetum moblie you fill it up and it lasts forever which is not true, that’s why they don’t use coolants either because none of that lasts forever, they’re just saving a lot of money by being able to dump toxic wastewater without immediate ecological disaster
Can’t wait for the water wars in less than 30 years :DD
While Google and Meta provide water usage data for individual facilities, Amazon did not disclose site-specific information.
More than a little skeptical of Amazon’s data, as without facility by facility numbers, it’s impossible to get any sort of sanity check on how accurate their numbers are.
I forget who owns this, but they’re in weird places too. This is at the Seattle Westin. I know presidents have stayed there, but now sure if they still do when they’re in town.
https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/americas/seattle/sea10
