This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That is an increase but less than I was expecting. Looking at the water use charts at TWDB it looks like irrigation uses the lions share of water at over 55%, which is most likely for farming. Municipalities (people) are next at about 25%. Surprisingly cattle and livestock barely register. I would have expected more.
Still not a fan of it, but interesting to see the comparative numbers.
Does the livestock figure include the water being used to grow their feed? Probably not because of course there's no guarantee that their feed is Texas sourced. But there are just SO many examples of already too dry places having astronomical amounts of water given (read: stolen legally) to farm stupidly water intensive crops that are only good for feeding livestock like alfalfa.
I wonder if this is newly built/to be built data centers for AI, or ones that previously existed/ are being built for general web infrastructure. The article doesn't say.
I wonder if this is newly built/to be built data centers for AI, or ones that previously existed/ are being built for general web infrastructure. The article doesn’t say.
The age of the DC doesn't really matter. Its whether it was designed to be an "open loop" or "closed loop" cooling system. Closed loop DC use surprisingly little water because they capture and recycle it. A fast food restaurant would likely use more water than a closed looped DC. The big offending Datacenters for water use are the Open Loop design. These use massive amounts of water.
Close to me there are two DCs under construction. One is a large colocation DC and is closed loop. The other is a new AWS DC, and it is open loop. So as you can see, age isn't really the determining factor.
So you're asking yourself, why use open loop at all? Its energy bill is cheaper! Open loop uses swamp coolers (evaporative cooling) Closed looped requires more electricity for cooling using more traditional phase-change coolant (same as residential air conditioners).
My question was based on the amount of water used by a data center (closed loop) that is used in the closed loop vs used to run the rest of the data center.
In my little bit of searching, I got some stats that suggest that in a closed loop system the closed loop cooling only uses about 25% of the data center's total usage.
But either way, the take away that some people will take from the article's title and contents is that these data centers are AI data centers. But non-AI data centers are still being built as more and more people gain Internet access.
This assumption colors how people will take this news and whether it's "good or bad".
Who still thinks living in the fucking desert is a great idea!
You gotta wonder if there's not ways to make this useful. Like, what if you used steam heat like NYC, or could supply hot water to downtown for businesses and hotels - even if you'd still have to heat it up some, it should be less than heating from tap temperatures.
NVIDIA is going to start selling hot water heaters, the heating elements are 2x H100s.
"Honey can you vibe code something, I need to get a shower!"
Global warming will bring more hurricanes to Texas. Problem solved
How much water for the chemicals and O&G industry?
