I'm just not sure I understand what point they're trying to make.<p>Honestly, 6500 households of water a day is nothing. Individual cities often write more than this off in a day when rain overwhelms their watershed systems.<p>Even with perfect watershed recovery our ability to treat, utilize, and transport it back without losses is a far bigger concern. The average age of pipes in the US is approaching 50 years old. I've seen reports project the US will need to invest nearly 1T in the next 15 years to sustain the current system and rate of growth.<p>Hell, there was a 54 inch water main break in Detroit this winter that flooded ~120 homes. A conservative estimate for a pipe of that size leaking all of its water for 5-6 hours is 20-25,000,000 gallons of water. We're going to be seeing a lot more of that.<p>Another thing I see overlooked constantly is that many of these DCs are augmented with their own filtration systems which allow them to primarily consume greywater for a net gain.
Well I guess they should not be building these data centers in areas with no water and high ave Temps. Where they are building having these issues are a surprise to no one.<p>There are areas with lots of land, water and much lower ave air temps in the US and some have empty buildings that can be retrofitted for use as data centers. But no, lets build in places that allow the company treat their employees as slaves.
I'm not inclined to endorse continued data center construction for much of anything, AI especially, but I was a little curious about how they determined what areas qualify as "high-stress" water conditions? Because they show red squares where I live (near Charlotte, NC) and we are pretty firmly within the normal range of precipitation and water levels. If anything, it's been wetter in the last 10-years than at any point in my lifetime.
when you get older and get past the "it was posted on the internet and therefore must be addressed rationally" thing then you might get by with "it's bloomberg" and get on with your day. don't let all these rumour mongering media companies waste your time
Surprised there isn't more of a push to align compute with suitable geography frankly.<p>A lot of stuff doesn't need 10ms latency. Why not move it somewhere that has geothermal, or abundant water, or say an ocean to dump heat into.<p>Seems like the approach is always to bring the resource to the datacenter instead
Obligatory link about AI water/energy use
<a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for" rel="nofollow">https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/individual-ai-use...</a>
I’m hugely pro conservation, clean air and water, etc.<p>But modern environmentalism is a religion and this is how it works. Any human advancement needs a narrative on how it hurts the planet.