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Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

397 points · 517 comments · sensanaty

  1. aliasxneo · · focus · HN ↗
    I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there 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. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.

    The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

    1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
      > But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them.

      I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.

      1. jmmv · · focus · HN ↗
        Google never wanted to share details about their datacenters because they thought (think?) their power efficiency was a competitive advantage. So it'd be lower than you expect.

        Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.

        1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
          Right, they're so power efficient they don't want to tell the people around them how little water they consume or "not consume"?

          People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.

          1. tbrownaw · · focus · HN ↗
            > don't want to tell the people around them

            It's probably more that they don't want to tell competitors anything they don't absolutely have to.

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