Everything is relative, 28.6m gallons per day is nothing.

Golf courses use nearly 100x more water per day than datacenters, nearly 2b gallons per day. [1]

Residential lawn water usage is ~9b gallons per day. [0]

0 - https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/docs/f...

1 - https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

For perspective, 28 million gallons of water per day is roughly equivalent to what 93,000 households consume per day. There are ~130,000,000 households in the United States.

To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops.

Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's more nuanced than some of the other arguments that could be made (noise and power usage being much more suitable ones) but it seems to have struck a cord.

There are absolutely terrible takes on each side of the water argument but this seems to be the one people are focused on so I guess it's up to folks in the know to try and give as much clarity on the topic as possible.

I’m actually surprised it’s so low. That’s about 7 seconds of the Mississippi River at its exit per day. Maybe a week or two of alfalfa farming per year, or even less?

You could imagine running way more water, but I guess these racks are extremely dense.