Americans across multiple states are being urged to conserve water as drought conditions intensify, reservoirs shrink, and utilities issue increasingly urgent warnings. At the same time, a different kind of consumer is quietly demanding unprecedented...
Doesn’t the water evaporate and become part of the water cycle? Water can’t just disappear? Maybe I’m missing something.
It would be good to cut down water usage… Not just for data centers but also for things like lawns and golf courses.
water does evaporates, goes into the atmosphere and comes down again as rain somewhere else. basically no water leaves the planet because the gravitational field is strong enough to retain practically all of it, even over billions of years.
typically, due to trade winds, winds generally blow towards the west in mid-latitudes. so if water evaporates in new york, it probably rains down over the midwest. if it evaporates over the midwest, it comes down in the great desert west of the midwest. in these cases, water isn’t lost as it falls down again over soil.
Earth’s wind systems
Let’s go to the Dalles in lovely Oregon. There is a Google data center there that draws water from the public supplies. It draws so much in a day, that at times the need for water in the whole community outstrips the ability of infrastructure to supply water. So people in the area see their water slow or cease altogether. The water is drawn so fast and in such amounts, wells dry up as the water table drops.
Water does eventually evaporate or get discharged from said data center, but its not like adding it in is an instantaneous event. It also doesn’t reenter the same system. Like picking up flour and trying to drop it back in the bag. Some ends up on your counter.
The data center in the Dalles is one hell of a story, too, for reason beyond that.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/15/as-googles-water-demands-grow-the-dalles-aims-to-pull-more-from-mount-hood-forest/
Love what you did here…but I don’t think the same logic applies to data centers.
Why can’t they pull water from the Columbia river? The buildings are less than 100 yards from the water.
I thought that myself and honestly I don’t know.
Clean water is needed, and i suppose they wouldn’t want to spend money cleaning it themselves, not sure.
Yes, the hydrological cycle is global, of course none of the water just disappears. What you’re missing is that the usage is local, data servers use mains water most of the time.
Mains water must come from somewhere, the local area has limited processing capabilities, and heavy industrial consumption severely depletes local groundwater reserves faster than natural rainfall can ever replenish them, forcing nearby communities to bear both the ecological and financial costs of a utility network that was almost never designed to handle such strain.
i mean, a regulation could be made up that requires data center operators to bring their own supplies, i.e. make up additional plumbing for the village. and pipe the water from somewhere where it’s plentiful. a big river or sth.
Makes sense - thanks.
Of course! Thanks for asking for clarification.
If their wastewater is clean and goes back into the usable water supply straight away then that’s fine. But if it flushes into drains or evaporates then you might have to wait a while for it to come back as fresh rain - and land in the right places to fill up the reservoirs.
It might matter how they’re designed/regulated and whether they keep the water clean and usable - which I assume costs more of other resources.
they also pollute water at some point, and the water comes out hotter, and then the datacenter needs to consume water from the area to cool down thier servers. they dont give any water back.