Washington Post opinion video reports all U.S. data centers consume less than 0.5 percent of national freshwater, with cooling at 17 billion gallons annually.

Data centers are not stealing your water

Good stuff out of @washingtonpost

"All US data centers combined account for less than ***one half of one percent*** of America’s fresh water use."

this is the most regressive piece of tech “journalism” i have seen in quite some time

claiming that karen hao’s book is what started the backlash against datacenters…. how did someone approve posting this???

@themimsshow And they’re also stealing your electricity and your jobs.

@johnawahba In the US, probably almonds.

@pbertrand_dev The definition of consumption here is water that is not readily available anymore locally. If it goes underground of it evaporates, it’s not available.

@naval @danushman Especially since I've discovered this new technology called “desalination” that folks in the Middle East and on Islands have pioneered that provides [ checks notes ] all of their water! 😂😂😂

@kyliebytes But that's just not what he said? He said "the rumor of datacentres chugging your water can be traced back to that book" which i think is true to a large extent.

@themimsshow lol. except when they do:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/one-of-the-biggest-data-center-projects-in-the-us-found-to-be-sucking-up-29-million-gallons-of-water-over-15-months-and-local-residents-only-found-out-after-complaining-of-low-pressure-when-they-were-initially-told-to-stop-watering-their-lawns

@kyliebytes i also have to point out that there were real water concerns in the situation hao wrote about regardless of her error!! there are some real water concerns about specific data center designs in specific areas!!! it's not a stupid thing to think about! GOD

@dvassallo where does all this water that lawns consume go? 🤔

LMAO which one of those emits massive thermal load into the environment that wouldn't otherwise be there?

Save me the 'sun hitting the almonds' bullshit

You're fucked and you know it as soon as people start talking about the heat instead of the water.

Water just moves the heat around.

WHERE IS THE HEAT GOING?

@giffmana that is just so so so not true

@themimsshow stanford ass pedantry ignoring the actual externalities

@sportss99 @dvassallo No one gets any value from the internet?

@dvassallo Datacenters are already at about 10%. You don't expect datacenters to 10x within 10 years?

I can attest to data centers not gobbling up the water. I worked at a Microsoft Data Center in Red Oak, TX for 18 months.. 3 buildings full of H200 GPU servers which used only air cooling.. Loud as hell from those exhaust fans.. other buildings used closed loop liquid cooling on GB300 servers. It's the electrical power that's the problem.. Gigawatts of power and they're not paying for it.. It's being paid by the other customers using the same power.. They just raise the cost per kilowatt/hour. Used to be under 10 cents for me.. Now it's 12 cents.

@HeadmasterDuck andy originally found the error iirc? IMO the widespread panic about it isn’t due to her book, and the error seemed mostly siloed in the tech world

@dvassallo Ah yes comparing data centers usage at their inception (exponential growth projected) is definitely fair let’s just Ignore that they’re literally building more as fast as humanly possible !

they made this ragebait in a lab just to piss me off specifically