Genuinely curious, how much water do data centers consume? I would think they might need a good amount of water at startup, but any use would be in a closed system. Am I misunderstanding their water use? Do they lose a lot of it to the atmosphere somehow?

Some data centers use evaporative cooling, in outside chillers. The water use is fairly high.

Is there a reason the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water, so the net effect of the data center is zero?

Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.

Water is fungible. If they need to pipe in 1 gallon of water, who pays the extra cost? The entity that used the last gallon? The entity that used the most? Nah. It’s averaged out across all users.

You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably commercially viable.

Right, so just make Amazon pay whatever is a commercially sustainable price. This shouldn’t be particularly hard.

Deregulation is good, they said. Don't be an alarmist, they said.

? Yeah, actually, deregulated water would mean Amazon would have to pay the full price instead of a subsidized price for water.

And if it turns out that Amazon would still "win" the price fight over the people who lived there before Amazon came there, it's all good?

And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?

"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".

What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.

I was responding to someone who made a joke about an obvious mispricing by the govt as being due to deregulation when it’s really the opposite.

As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.

That means _everyone_ pays the higher price. Water is fungible. You can tax them if you want. But you can’t expect market forces to do it.

Wait, what? Utilities all over the world have rate systems that offer higher or lower prices based on who's paying. "Water is fungible" doesn't mean that you can't charge Amazon more for it than you do the little old lady down the street.

I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.

Those are the result of heavy regulation, not deregulation.

Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.

Your last sentence disproves the first.

>> Water is fungible

I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?

There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.

Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!

The existence of various grades of a commodity says nothing about whether that commodity at those grades is fungible. Mostly it implies the opposite, in fact.

But you can't then say unqualified that "water is fungible". Sewer water is not fungible with potable water. Greywater is not fungible with distilled or RO water. I'm not convinced that sewer water is fungible at all, considering its unknown content!

People do this all the time actually. "Cotton is fungible", "oil is fungible".

The grading is assumed.

I will remember this next time Amazon tries to ship me Artesian Spring Deuterium or Tritium to me, and extra shipping/handling charges apply

There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.

If you want to get overly pedantic, money is not fungible either then. Sanctioned currency, dirty money that needs laundering, etc.

But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about

Government usually, same as it is with Nestle in the US.

> the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water

Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.

> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.

Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?

> is it just a mispricing of the water?

...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.

> Is there a reason the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water

The market is typically not a great place to solve conflict. Unless you're the richer party, of course.

I'm not aware of any single one like that in Mexico.

Jesus christ. We're a nation run by toddlers.

Most data centers use evaporative cooling towers, they’re much more efficient than a closed loop system.

This source is specifically about AIs water usage: https://savethe.ai/water/

> Having it generate a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).

> 10 to 50 queries consume about 2 litres of water (½ gallon).2

Right, but you know that’s not true.

I would imagine you are talking about Queretaro. Google and Microsoft also have data centers there.

This is a thing that has been more than a decade in the making, mostly because Queretaro does not have seismic activity and is only a couple of hours north of Mexico City.

While the water sources are completely different, both regions are prone to intense water seasons and, in the last couple of years, intense droughts.

More specifically, Queretaro is a semi-desert, so this behavior is a bit more expected.

Aside: Coming from personal experience I don't think that current agricultural methods are the best and are pron to wasting water, at least what I remember from Queretaro

Yes, Querétaro state (not the city).

If you check the link in my comment these are not the data centers close to the city which everyone knows but newer ones in Colón.

For all intents and purposes, Colon is considered to be part of the ZMQ (Zona Metropolitana de Queretaro)^1

Funny thing the english wikipedia article does not even mention it. But yeah, Each of those Cloud providers, have at least 3 buildings distributed on multiple industrial parks in the metropolitan area and I'm not even mentioning the ones from Kio Networks, IBM (SoftLayer). We are one step away from having one from OVH and Hetzner.

The only data center I know that is in the middle of the city of Queretaro is the one from Triara (aka Telmex, one of the many companies from Carlos Slim). Most of them are in the outskirts of the urban area.

1. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_metropolitana_de_Quer%C3%...