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quickthrowmantoday at 1:03 PM0 repliesview on HN

All US data center water usage is less than the total water used for golf courses or the total water used to grow alfalfa. Less water used in evaporative cooling means more electricity is used for cooling given that the efficiency almost doubles if you add evaporative cooling to a chilled water loop.

It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.