I don’t understand why the Microsoft water story keeps getting posted over and over again. Yes, their data centers use a relatively large amount of water if ambient temperatures reach 30°C, but the total water usage wasn’t even that bad.
Microsoft took up 6% of the water capacity for a city of 68 thousand. That’s not some kind of hose intended to drain the river. 40% of water demand in the region us used for lawn irrigation, it’s not like children are dying of drought because of ChatGPT.
Conceptually, using this much water is dubious. If you want to change things, don’t look at Microsoft, be mad at the public utilities selling that much water to a data center. Vote for local government officials that won’t let them construct a data center in the middle of a state often hit by droughts. Take the 30ms latency hit and only constructed data centers along the coast, and maybe along big lakes.
I’m actually curious on the water usage. How is it being utilized that it is completely removed from circulation? Or is it simply being used, dumped into the cities return, and used again?
Because water running through a datacenter… sounds like perfectly drinkable water. Maybe a little warm?
In every water cooling loop for consumer grade computing hardware, the water is cycled through for hundreds (thousands?) of hours before servicing is needed. I think it would be pretty easy for a company with such massive resources to have some sort of small on site water treatment facility or filtration system. Swimming pools filter their water, why can’t data centers?
I don’t think the water would be potable after running through that sort of hardware because the piping is probably not safe for transporting drinking water, especially at high temperatures when different chemicals could leech into the water. There’s also fittings, lubricants, anti-microbial additives, etc. that would further complicate things.
How about both? During a long drought why shouldn’t people be mad at a multinational company sucking up water to use for their international tech products?
and 6% for a single purpose is also still a lot
6% of the water is effectively being used by billions of people. That’s pretty efficient versus keeping lawns greener for a few thousand people who insist on using non-native plants for landscaping.
I’m arguing for making all avenues of water use more efficient. I reread what I typed, and I can’t seem to find where I argued against making lawn water use more efficient as well. It’s also why I upvoted the comment I replied to, because of “How about both?”, specifically
This isn’t a jab at you personally, but I notice lemmy replies in general seem to add in/make up points to argue against pretty often. It’s kinda exhausting to continue making non-memey comments on anything, because it seems guaranteed someone will misread it and respond to what they misread
I’m saying that 6% isn’t a lot considering the number of people effectively using that water.
It’s like when people moan about California having to pipe in water for its agriculture without considering how many people outside of California are eating that food.
Just wait until 2050, when the handful of remaining hyper-mega-conglomerates form a single capitalist hydra and decree “the only option to the planet dying from our obscene consumerism and overconsumption is to genocide the poorest 1 billion”… and they’ll have a 56% public approval rating because all murders are conducted using fully autonomous killbots, so we don’t have to sacrifice our children.
And in 2060 it’ll be the poorest 5 billion.
And in 2070 it’ll be the poorest 99%.
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That won’t happen. They love the ultra poor because they are so economically desperate that they can make them do anything by dangling a few pennies in front of them.
I chuckle every time someone says that AI is going to take all the jobs. Ok, so are the AI going to buy all the products?
Yup, corporations love to shift blame to consumers.
I’m confused, why would they consume water? Why wouldn’t they water cool with a closed loop system, or, better yet, a system that draws water from these rivers, and dumps the warm water back in?
Dumping warm water back into these systems usually is even worse as it can cause a host of issues for wildlife. A closed loop system should definitely be used though.
