Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 day agoI mean sure, but that’s an argument against where you locate data centres, not necessarily to stop them entirely. i.e. evaporating that water is a problem in a region that’s already over populated and doesn’t have enough water
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Not really, because you also start depleting the readily available potable water and increasing toxin concentration in remaining sources. See other comments for just how much these things suck up. It’s truly mind staggering amounts of water. There’s very few areas that can handle that amount of water with no issue for extended periods of time. For some reason (read money) the politicians in charge of approving these things are turning a blind eye to those problems.
Low population areas with high amounts of water are usually nature preserves and things we don’t want these data centers anywhere near. If you do chance into finding a low population center with high water that isn’t a needed nature preserve, odds are you won’t have all the infrastructure you need to build the thing and you’ll run into other issues that might have an equally large but different impact. You can’t just plop these anywhere and run a power line and call it good.
That’s why in other sane countries outside the US you see a large number of proposed data centers get blocked during the environmental impact assessment stages.