Re:Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a ...
by Aloisius on Monday December 15, 2025 @03:50PM
(#46280436)
All the golf courses where I live use grey water - water that would otherwise be dumped into oceans/estuaries/rivers/etc.
That's not really not comparable to data centers using potable water.
Re:Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a ...
by jeffbee on Monday December 15, 2025 @04:19PM
(#46280817)
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.