Comment by jandrewrogers 2 days ago
> use too much ground water
Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.
The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.
They use evaporative cooling towers because you need far fewer of them. The evaporating water can be separate from the main cooling loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower#Heat_transfer_me...
Charge them more for water and electricity until they're using the amount of water you think is right.
The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.
Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
If they're shills (= people being paid to behave a certain way), then delusional doesn't come into it. However, such commentary on downvotes isn't productive. From the news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.