alt Hacker NewsWater usage in this context is a rounding error on a rounding error on top of a rounding error when it comes to corn production for ethanol.
Anyone bringing it up does not actually care about the water usage. It’s just a politically easy topic to get traction with. If anyone starts off their anti-datacenter screed with this, it instantly outs them as someone you can ignore as unserious person on the topic.
Plenty of other legitimate reasons to be anti-datacenter but this isn’t one of them.
I’m against corn production for ethanol too: that AI datacenters aren’t as bad as one of the worst ideas our country has ever had, isn’t much praise.
You know what instantly outs someone as unserious on the topic for me? When they give an unqualified “none of that is true” when someone talks about water use. I agree discussion should carry the nuance, but this conversation started with none of it.
A modern 100MW scale datacenter uses about as much water as a 5-10k population municipality. And provides about as many jobs as a medium-sized wal-mart. Whether that’s a lot to you or not certainly depends on where the proposed datacenter is being built. But it does nobody any good to simply say “nuh uh, you’re wrong” when someone talks about the water use. Nor does bringing up any number of other high-water-using industrial sites that people also wouldn’t want in their back yard.