> the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry

Data centers tend to concentrate their water usage within urban areas, causing a strain on local resources. The value of their output is much less tangible. Their water consumption scales up around tenfold if you consider the indirect usage from generating the electricity.

But on the other hand; yes, it would also help enormously if people ate less meat.

Actually your premise is already wrong, although to be fair I'm not sure what bearing that has on the conclusion.

Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.

But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.

>And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.

These are resources acquired from the governments in most places. You have to be able to plan and expand capacity which requires public funds.

I live right next to a waste valorisation plant[1]. They have to exactly specify what amount of water they use and what amount of water they then send out to the waste water treatment facility. It also has to be clean to a very specific standard before it leaves which is also checked.

We have datacenters in Switzerland too, but very little outrage or debate because there are strict rules in place in most places. They can build all they want but it costs significantly more to meet environmental requirements.

The valorisation plant next to my home has water cooling tower/fans significantly oversized just to make sure the noise is keep under the required level.

[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/

> where electricity is abundant and/or cheap

Definitely not the Netherlands then

> And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

This is a Dutch website and here in the Netherlands we have demand issues. In these same areas where issues exist, data centres are being planned and built. There are waiting lists now for normal businesses who want a new connection to the net, or connections with more capacity. These are lists waiting for capacity to become available: The demand on the current net is already too high.

People keep comparing datacenter water use to agricultural water use, and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's a bad-faith comparison or if people really know that little about how water is used in these industries.

The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.

That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.

If the numbers would make them look good they would publish their numbers.

> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.

Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.

You are totally right to point this out, and I apologize for the whiplash. Let's clarify exactly how overblown data centre water usages is compared to the agriculture industry.

In data centres all that water is so that some wimpy cunt gets to hit return after spending no more than 5 minutes in an half baked prompt so he can insert the answer into his pitch deck, or PR review — and now with pacing the frontier models, he actually doesn't need to insert it, it's inserted automatically wherever it might fit. When it comes to agriculture, that is to produce things like food. This requires obviously much more water, which means that's what we really should be cutting down. Agents don't need food so the solution is just to replace humans with agents.

If you have any other stubborn question resisting clarification just hit me up, and I'll explain it to you immediately and clearly.

> why would a private company provide this information?

Because there's a building populist push against these developments.

Presumably they still want to build these things. If I was trying to convince people who hate me to let me do what I want, I would not play so secretive as it may look suspicious. Especially if, ostensibly, the data is in my favor.

Are you autistic or just antisocial? This is pretty straightforward