ryan cooper: here's a chart showing that Microsoft, the world's second-largest company by market cap, consumes ~6300 acre-feet of water per year, which is to say ~1.5 percent as much as alfalfa farmers in the Colorado River basin, or ~0.2 percent as much as Imperial Valley farmers www.wired.com/story/ai-ene...

here's a chart showing that Microsoft, the world's second-largest company by market cap, consumes ~6300 acre-feet of water per year, which is to say ~1.5 percent as much as alfalfa farmers in the Colorado River basin, or ~0.2 percent as much as Imperial Valley farmers www.wired.com/story/ai-ene...

source: www.hcn.org/articles/lan...

The Colorado River’s alfalfa problem - High Country Newswww.hcn.org Growing less hay is the only way to keep the river’s water system from collapsing

under 10,000 acre feet is chump change water-wise, even in arid Western states, and a lot of these data centers are not in places where water is scarce

Also there’s fewer restrictions on using reclaimed water for data centers than for agricultural use.

and most of the microsoft facilities i assume are not in water-strained parts of the United States the same way the Colorado River water for farming is?

less than half, it seems datacenterlocations.com/microsoft-az...

yeah but microsoft doesn’t feed saudi horses

The water argument isn’t great. The tech is bad and the energy usage sucks but the water is meh

The energy usage is also relatively small, like one mid-sized US city

As long as energy isn’t carbon neutral, it’s all too much. But that’s in general. A US citizen consumes four times as much energy as a German which is ridiculous

Ok, but water spent on alfalfa results in actual calories of nutritional value.

I mean, eventually, but it has to be eaten by cows first, so it's a lot of gallons per calorie

Reminds me of some old science cartoon of being on a spaceship with chickens and corn. And because of entropy, you eat the chickens first because they will consume your potential energy if they eat corn...

It's hard to overstate how much we are sacrificing in the Great Basin and Colorado watershed for alfalfa. This isn't an "okay but" situation.

Holy fuck, that is a terrible trajectory

The question is whether we need that alfalfa grown in what used to be a desert or if we need computing services run near large f***ing rivers full of water If MS is a problem then why isn’t alfalfa and almonds grown in friggin California?

The water used to cool a DC is not radioactive, it is not disintegrated. Some may evaporate, but it is still water.

Oh hey, we probably agree on a lot of water issues. that's nice.

We grow rice in the California desert. All we need to do to double the amount of water for urban Californian is shift the rice acreage to alfalfa, the second wettest crop. With federal built and funded water projects.

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