Efforts like this are essential for data center operations to become sustainable. After all, despite the pushback against new data center projects, we cannot forever put a moratorium on them as AI’s demand for compute is increasing. But until AI hyperscalers can earn back the trust of the people and prove that they can build infrastructure without increasing costs for everyone else and hoarding the resources that communities need for their survival, then they can only expect opposition to continue.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He\u2019s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he\u2019s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-24/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jowi Morales Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
ezst036 This is actually a quite brilliant deflection propaganda from Amazon. See, they use more than we do and we are essential! Who needs green lawns! Reply
hwertz so, a) People in the desert, or wherever when there's a drout, are told to quit watering their lawns then stop. Will data centers stop using water in those times? Oh they won't huh? b) Amazon's percentage of water use is for themselves alone, for their exising data centers, while all these providers plan to greatly expand the amount compared to now. Almost 0.1% compared to what people use on lawns and gaedens actually sounds pretty high to me given this is for a single service provider. c )If data centers used minimal water, this concern wouldn't even be a thing. If Amazon's use way less, great, but others presumably aren't doing this. Why aren't they just using closed loop cooling anyway? If I bought water cooling for a PC, I don't hook one end to the faucet and the other run to the drain. Reply
ggeeoorrggee The non-rebuttal to buttress the whataboutism argument reminds me of people who justify massive tax cuts for the rich by quoting some meaningless version of “the top x% of earners pays y% of all taxes” or some similar nonsense. Without backing context of how much income that x% makes as a percentage of the whole, the statement lacks a true conclusion. Without a figure how much space data centers occupy vs the green space, the comparison is useless. That’s even before we get to the argument that lawns are contributing positively to the ecology, not negatively. Admittedly, still far from the best use of growing space., but still greener. A more apt comparison would be how much water does a data center consume per whatever-unit compared to commercial business space unit. I think the results would look poor in any analysis and they know it. Reply
SmokyBarnable Amazon is successfully highlighting the enormous US water waste on grass lawns, relics from the 18th century that are ecological dead zones. They should add golf courses to their calculations. But for adding gardens to this balance sheet, Amazon can f*ck right off. As if nourishing beauty and insects and birds is some frivolous pursuit and data centers are the height of humanity. Reply
The Historical Fidelity Why can’t these data centers use closed loop water coolers like the rest of us. Reply
TechieTwo So in plain English, Amazon is consuming 2,147,639,281,964,370 gallons of H2O per day. Why would anyone be concerned? /s 🙁 Reply
tntdyno yea no. water going to the lawn returns to earth. Period. water going thru datacenters must be treated and recycled in a way to be useable again. Requiring power and resources… generating pollution. they are not the same. Reply
hotaru251 hwertz said: People in the desert, or wherever when there's a drout, are told to quit watering their lawns then stop. in fact the state will actively pay you to rip out your grass in many of those locations and repalce it w/ fake grass to save on water usage. it said that that amount is still a fraction of what other industries in the U.S. are using annually. just because is doing less bad than doesn't mean its a good thing..it means both are still bad and need change to happen across board. fact is they should require data center corpos to HEAVILY invest in the utilities they require to function scaling on the size of the corpo parent company. Wanna use lots of water? build up desalination sites to amount you will need.Wanna use lots of power? Build up the national grid to add at least as much as you plan to use & if you cross that you are requried to build up 2x your usage with compounding punishments for going over again. if the leeches of society wanthoard the resources they should be required to invest in those fields. Reply
bit_user This article conveniently ignores the water used during power-generation, needed to actually run the data centers. In another recent article, that was estimated at 54% of a typical datacenter's total water usage. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/most-new-us-ai-data-centers-are-going-up-on-drought-land Also, semiconductor fabrication is happening in some areas with water scarcity, and datacenters are driving demand for those chips. That same article estimated the impact at 42%. Reply
bit_user tntdyno said: yea no. water going to the lawn returns to earth. Period. Well… a lot of it evaporates. Also, the return trip to the water table is very slow, hence why lawn watering is one of the first things to get restricted or banned during droughts. tntdyno said: water going thru datacenters must be treated and recycled in a way to be useable again. That assumes they're not using evaporative cooling, which a lot of datacenters do for sake of energy-efficiency. tntdyno said: Requiring power and resources… generating pollution. Not using evaporative cooling requires more power. Also, in a closed-loop cooling system, I think you don't normally have to do much in the way of treatment, once the system is up and running. Reply
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