2026-09-24 13:59 UTC
Replies (11)
-
@usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 2026-09-24 15:36
Copying from another thread on this, but the focus on water use over electricity and emissions of datacenters does not make sense. It’s just helping datacenter by focusing on the wrong environmental issue because they are not a major contributor to water use. Agriculture, and animal agriculture specifically, are the super dominant water users. Even in water scarce places like the Colorado river archive.is/Gpibv Animal agriculture also pollutes ground water, and at a far higher rate and frequency. They create toxic algae blooms are from the runoff which means high nitrate levels in the local water level. Cancer rates are elevated nearby animal farms www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0013935126006286 Meanwhile electrical usage is delaying fossil fuel plant closure, leading to new ones, leading to backup generator use, etc. Datacenters are projected to go from 5% of electricity use to 15%. I keep seeing 5x the number of posts on the water usage than emissions. It’s letting datacenters get away with their super high emissions with so much less attention to it
-
@Malica@lemmy.zip 2026-09-24 22:21
It evaporates in cooling. A closed loop system would avoid this, but it’s more expensive, so we destroy ourselves instead.
-
@drmoose@lemmy.world 2026-09-25 06:24
It goes nowhere - it’s dumb propaganda for dumb people who missed their 2nd grade.
-
@Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2026-09-24 14:22
The 264 billion gallons absorb enough energy from the data center to evaporate. They turn into a gaseous form and rise into the sky where they become clouds. The clouds will eventually precipitate and turn into rain, but it might take months and months, and it probably won’t happen in dry areas with low rainfall. It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
-
@Professorozone@lemmy.world 2026-09-25 06:43
This is a really good video on the subject. I mean as long as I copied the URL correctly. m.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&pp=ygURRGF0YSBj…
-
@A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 2026-09-24 21:27
Put a straw in your hand. Get a mouthful of ice cold water Blow it through the straw out the other side. Feel it cool your hand? See how its dispersed out to god knows the fuck where? Never returning in any significant volume to replenish the cup it was drawn from Thats basically whats going on. Billions of gallons of drinkable water, wasted because data centers didnt want to pay the extra cost for a closed loop cooling system. putting enormous strain on water systems that are already at or beyond their breaking points and are not able to replenish at even a fraction of the rate that they are being drained from.
-
@grue@lemmy.world 2026-09-24 15:47
It evaporates. They could cool it back down and reuse it, but that would increase costs even more and corporations like money. Also, “but it remains part of the water cycle” is irrelevant. Of fucking course it does; we’re not talking about nuclear fusion here! But what matters isn’t how much water exists, it’s how much usable water exists and when it evaporates it stops being usable.
-
@devedeset@lemmy.zip 2026-09-25 08:10
There’s ones that use evaporative cooling, meaning they draw water off of a river/lake/creek (or domestic water supply) and cool through putting that water into the air. Lots of power plants do this exact thing, especially nuclear power plants. There’s ones that use closed cycle cooling, like a bigass water cooled PC. The water generally stays inside. It periodically needs to be cycled. There’s also measures out there that account for all of the water needed to produce all of the components. The water used for that is one time usage. Are these things “using up” water? Sure, some of them are in the sense they are accelerating evaporation. Some are using very little water.
-
@DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2026-09-25 08:12
First of all, in general it depends what kind of water is used - river, lake, ground water - but in this case it’s almost always easily accessible river and lake water, because it’s the cheapest (surprise, surprise). This is actually much better than it would have been with underground aquifers, because those take long years to refill. However, whenever you collect river or lake water and evaporate it, it’ll almost never return as rain in the exact same place. Partially because that’s just how it works, and partially because climate change is affecting rain patterns almost everywhere. So if you quickly use up half of an entire river - a good amount of the water will return as rain, but away from the river, so the river will still shrink. This is bad, because ecosystems depend on rivers and lakes, including people. It also doesn’t mean new rivers or lakes will be created elsewhere. All our current lakes and rivers have been created over millenia. Depending on where all that extra rain falls - the water may not even have a positive impact, e.g., because it’ll cause a flood. Depending on the specific geographic location, some of the water may be completely wasted, because the rain will fall into the sea. In the middle of the country (US) it’s pretty much 0%, but closer to the shore it may be nearing 100%. There’s also the problem of some data centers ignoring ecological regulations, and dumping all kinds of waste into the same rivers they use for cooling. There was at least one case of an xAI data center seriously polluting a river. The single biggest issue is just the scale of water extraction. Most of humanity’s water use has been slowly growing over thousands of years, with appropriate infrastructure built and ecological research conducted. Not exactly true in the US (go figure), but I’m simplifying. Big cities obviously use a lot of water, too. But they were built and populated over up to 300 years (or much more outside North America). Now imagine adding several big citties worth of water consumption, all in just a few years, without any ecological oversight.
-
@Radical_Socialist_t00t@lemmy.ca 2026-09-26 00:04
Thats not how closed water systems work. There’s a reason there’s no real data behind the watershortage doomsayers.
-
@rumba@lemmy.zip 2026-09-26 05:39
Nah, they ran out of water because they found a way to make money with it. Pray they don’t find a way to use oxygen or we’ll have PerriAIR from spaceballs