It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.

Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.

Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.

"You have a million dollars? Damn man you a regular Elon Musk or something"

What’s the difference between a million and a billion? A billion.

I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).

I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!

Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.

If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.

Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.

Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.

This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.

Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.

Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.

Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.

[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]

Always use the same unit in comparisons.

Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!

I understand it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond in California.

That's right, and it takes ~600 gallons of water to make one hamburger.

1: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-the-water-foot...

2: https://www.almonds.com/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

And most of that alfalfa is owned by a Saudi conglomerate that then exports it to the other side of the planet to feed its dairy cattle

You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle

You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.

Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.

My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.

It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.

You are overlooking location. The ideal place to place a datacenter is a place with cheap land, cheap electricity, good backbone connectivity, and close to users, but there aren't a lot of those.

Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.

Vastly cheaper to just have an efficient water market. But the current system makes farmer either use their water allocations for agriculture or not have that water at all.

Desalination can be ecologically disastrous. You have to put all that salt somewhere (and it's a lot).

Attach a salt factory to the desalination plant?

Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.

1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...

2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...

I'm mildly surprised that almost 10% of the US golfs. That makes the 0.3% of water usage from TFA seem less bad.

Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.