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...
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
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?
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
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...
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?
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.