Comment by demosthanos

> These comparisons to existing uses of water besides cooling "AI data centers" ignore the fact that water use for "AI data centers" is additive. It is a _new_ use of water not seen before. As such, the comparisons to existing uses are unconvincing.

No, I'm not ignoring that. I'm saying two things:

1) When put next to existing water usage, data center water usage stops looking as crazy large as is implied in TFA. All data centers for all compute purposes in the EU used as much water in 2024 as the creation of a single food product used in 2019. That's important perspective to have when we're talking about additive water usage, because it hints out what percentage increase we're talking about [0].

2) I don't accept the presumption that existing usage has preeminence now and forever by simple virtue of being older. We should be able to look at all water usage that currently stands and decide which usages are worth keeping and which are worth adding.

You're welcome to disagree that data centers (AI and otherwise, because non-AI workloads are included in the numbers) are worth more than chocolate, but it should be as part of a fair comparison between them on the merits, with no grandfathering chocolate and agriculture in just because the chocolate companies and farmers got there before anyone was paying attention to monitoring water usage.

[0] If you can find a percentage increase from data centers figure that would be even better, but I can't find absolute numbers for total water usage in the EU to construct such a figure.