going to keep pointing out golf uses a bit more in two days than microsoft, google, and apple combined use in an entire year
turn golf courses into housing with a put-put course attached
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...
I agree that cash crops are a bigger issue but it’s still a not insignificant amount of water, especially in the south west. Its about 10 billion a year non recycled which is 10% more than apple, google, and microsoft use combined
This data center water usage discourse is so weird. Water is entirely a logistics challenge, the Earth has plenty and using it doesn't destroy it. But we get these graphs of undifferentiated water usage happening somewhere.
a month ago someone insisted google used 400B gallons of water from ai and when i pointed out the 2022 usage (cuz 2023 report wasn’t out yet)
she refused to believe that isnt something google could do even if they wanted to. like there’s not a big dial you can just turn you uh need infrastructure
the city of boulder co owns a municipal golf course. i desperately want to turn it into a dense car-free village but it'll never pass. it's along two multi-use paths and adjacent to a future transit hub
a guy can dream
The difference is we aren't capable of ramping up the grid at the rate data centers can be energized and eat up capacity
They will easily overwhelm our ability to add generation, transmission, and substations
This is exactly the problem I work on professionally
I was ambivalent about the golf courses in Milwaukee until I learned how MUCH money they bring in for the park district. Sure pay for the bike path I ride next to the course. But, we don't have the same water problem other places have.
