Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

384 points · 503 comments · sensanaty

tptacek · 1791145040 · focus · HN ↗
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
1. mrb · 1791146490 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
  The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
  1. rtpg · 1791157940 · focus · HN ↗
    Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
    So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
    To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
    It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
    [0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/water/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/water/
    WarmWash · 1791161005 · focus · HN ↗
    Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
    If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
    A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
    So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
    I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
    Waterluvian · 1791161629 · focus · HN ↗
    That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
    I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
    tptacek · 1791170922 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
    If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
    chii · 1791180025 · focus · HN ↗
    > But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
    you've hit the silent nail on the head.
    The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
    If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
    It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
    None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
    Teever · 1791173585 · focus · HN ↗
    I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.
    Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
    That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
    So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.

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