alt Hacker News> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
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They do! In great detail:
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.
Now that it has been, though…
Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.