LillyLyle/Count MelancholiaRT'ed by William Gibson on Twitter:
and it's so very on the nose of the issue:
and it's so very on the nose of the issue:
viq@LillyHerself there's also the "please conserve water, don't take long baths etc", meanwhile golf courses and cooling for aforementioned AI.
LongwingGolf courses, absolutely, but Datacenters don't actually consume water. Most datacenters don't even have a water-cooling component. Those that do use closed-loop systems or natural water sources. The cost to a datacenter to _consume_ fresh water for cooling would be prohibitive.
Hate on 'em for what they're doing, sure, but the main thing datacenters consume is electricity.
Mighty Orbot@Longwing
Really, though, the problem is simply the water being taken away from humans, often in places where there’s very little water to spare to begin with.
@Longwing “Companies can either use traditional air conditioning to cool the servers, which is expensive, or use water for evaporative cooling. The latter is cheaper, but it also sucks up millions of gallons of water. A large data center, researchers say, can gobble up anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day — as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/25/data-centers-drought-water-use/
Cifer@mighty_orbot @Longwing I suspect "it's expensive" means "it takes a lot of electricity", so it's basically lose-lose. Joy!