Meta announces new data centers

We largely stopped growing avocados in the US when water rates went up. With the increased rates, and NAFTA, US avocado ranchers could not compete. There is speculation that Mexican cartels own/operate much of the Mexican avocado industry that we rely on.

I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.

Ohio is not exactly short on water.

You've got Erie to the North, the Ohio to the South East, and about 40 inches of rainfall per year, or 81M acre-feet of water for the whole state in precipitation, or around ~80 BILLION gallons of rain water per day.

The water is returned to the atmosphere as vapor, not transmuted into bismuth and shipped overseas, never to be seen again.

You're talking about 1/20,000th of the rain water.

Okay, it's not nothing. But it's not going to ruin all the farms or something.

If I had to guess, the issue is that they are taking treated water and releasing it back into the environment. It is consumed in the sense that what comes out is not identical to what goes in in terms of its temperature and composition (e.g. what's dissolved in it). If they aren't treating their own water, it will also have an impact on local water treatment facilities.

The constant drum of limited-pie headlines is getting really grating. Stock/Personal "paper-money" valuations coupled with Citizens United has really broken our brain into thinking that everything everywhere is just Billionaires stealing stuff, when realistically this is just water that will be recycled, available for anyone else to use.

But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.

Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.

P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!

It's boiling water with GPUs, I guess. Even a fancy anti-matter AI reactor will be boiling water and spin turbines in the future.

Mark?

500,000 gallons of water per day is approximately 1 golf course. There are 400 golf courses in Georgia. But "we just don't have the water!" screech bad-faith reactionaries.

If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.

Hmm bit of googling indicates one example: at least some data centers use cooling towers which dissipate heat via evaporation, i.e. loss of some water from the system.

I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.

It's also used for humidification to avoid static discharges, apparently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/

Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.

From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

> Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Doesn't seem to be a closed system.

Some types of industrial cooling pull fresh water in and dump heated water back out as waste water. I don't know how Meta's datacenters are cooled, but such a thing does exist.

Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.

most don't use closed loop

Engadget often has sensationalist, inaccurate headlines. I stopped reading them when I was intimately with the actual details of an article vs the way they framed/presented it. Also, what kind of water? Pure clean water, untreated water, Grey water, etc? Bottled water and other industries consume millions of gallons too. If its for cooling, I imagine water can be used that isn't being used for any other purpose. At least the water cycle is a thing, the alternative is A/C cooling which would be even more harmful. This is one of those cases where even if a company picks the least bad option, they're going to get criticized because negative agitating headlines get clicks.

A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.

The main problem is that the temperature difference isn't high enough to do a lot of useful things with the waste heat from data centers.

Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground.

Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter.

[1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.

Have you considered the trillions of gallons of water which get heated every day by the sun and then all that heat evaporates in the night?

Shareholder, not shareholders.

The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.

I prefer to focus my activism toward the companies of the shares I don't hold