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In drought-ridden areas where water consumption is already a very politically sensitive issue, datacenter water usage is admittedly not risk-free
Though the water issue itself is probably more fear than reality. There's also some other issues like the instance where wellwater was poisoned with nitrates in at least one instance which probably contributes to the fears though I can find like a grand total of like 2 stories on water contamination (this and the Morgan County story).
I think there'd be alleviation of a lot of these concerned if these cooling loops could use gray water or something similar, but as it stands there's too much stuff in them
Even focusing on the regions with the most water stress, this gives an inaccurate impression.
Water usage in acre feet:
Arizona datacenters: 2,777
Arizona alfalfa: 1,310,000
Nevada datacenters: 2,197
Nevada alfalfa: 645,000
Its water usage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single crop. And no one is histrionic about the threat of alfalfa to kill us all by using up all our water.
For my own reference, would you mind linking to where you're getting those numbers from? Thank you in advance.
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Pearson v. Port of Morrow is mostly about agricultural nitrate use and bad filtering approaches by the Port during wastewater treatment (and, allegedly, overt dumping). Amazon's just not mechanically plausible for more than a couple percent of nitrogen in the system; they're just not that big a source of incoming wastewater and they can't be concentrating that heavily. They settled for 'go away' money.
The Morgan County story looks to have turned out to be the normal effects of construction, and hard to distinguish what portion (if any) is specific to the data center construction.
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Is anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling? Otherwise they're just using the same water round and round. It looks like it is used some places, but we could easily be adding incentives or requirements for closed loop (air of ground source) cooling and battery-backed solar on rooftops instead of outright bans.
Yes, open loop cooling is often used where water is cheaper than power. Of course, that water that goes up in the air doesn't exactly vanish.
Keep in mind that many datacenters are located in places where water just falls out of the sky.
Yeah, I realized after writing this that the server racks at work, which are air cooled, probably count as "open loop" here because the large site HVAC (for offices and equipment) has a cooling tower.
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The majority of them are, currently, it seems
Even closed-loop systems do need to be replenished once in a while (although much much greater efficiency). The tradeoff there is power usage; closed loop systems use more.
Yeah. I think the current environment on this just is incredibly low trust so I think it'd do little to quell outrage. I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible
It's the most visible specifically because it's the weakest argument. It's a specialized variant of nutpicking. It's the same reason that people constantly (and intentionally) conflated marginal conspiracy theories with reasonable ones during COVID. If you're dunking on 5g graphene mind control arguments, you don't have to look too hard at the lab leak hypothesis. If you're dunking on a math error from Empire of AI, you don't have to talk about the noise, or the utility costs, or the municipal NDAs and corruption, or the blatant disregard for zoning and environmental laws, or anything else that's going on right now. You can just call that person "low IQ" and move on.
It isn't nutpicking, though; it's the second greatest concern of people objecting to datacenters (see linked Cremieux post above), barely trailing power usage.
I would be extraordinarily pleased if we could start talking about concerns grounded in reality. But anyone who lists water usage as a concern is either desperately misinformed, a propagandist, or indeed low IQ.
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Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.
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