@strypey

> How? You can't "consume" water in the sense you consume energy. Why can't they just reuse the same water?

Data centres consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% sourced from potable water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation.

Water used for cooling evaporates, and data centres do not have systems in place to capture that. Water is too cheap. Groundwater depletion is a thing, and data centres compete with farming and with local communities.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-021-00101-w
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2342490-how-much-water-do-data-centres-use-most-tech-companies-wont-say/
https://fortune.com/2023/09/09/ai-chatgpt-usage-fuels-spike-in-microsoft-water-consumption/

> 80% of content in data centres could be stuff we never use again, stored by default to consume energy in perpetuity

A hard drive that is powered on consumes electricity. The more hard drives you buy and power on, the more electricity is consumed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/power-grab-hidden-costs-of-ireland-datacentre-boom

https://volume.lboro.ac.uk/digital-waste-polluting-the-planet/index.html

https://theconversation.com/dark-data-is-killing-the-planet-we-need-digital-decarbonisation-190423