I suppose not all water cooling systems (especially of this scale) work exactly like e.g. a water-cooled PC.

Describing it as "gobbling" is definitely odd, in either case.

A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location. Another example, of letting the perfect environmental ideal that isn't feasible be the enemy of the good.

> Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Doesn't seem to be a closed system.

Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.

If the press insists on covering this, it should be in terms of competing economic interests bidding on water, not rapacious ecovillains.

You've got Erie to the North, the Ohio to the South East, and about 40 inches of rainfall per year, or 81M acre-feet of water for the whole state in precipitation, or around ~80 BILLION gallons of rain water per day.

The water is returned to the atmosphere as vapor, not transmuted into bismuth and shipped overseas, never to be seen again.

You're talking about 1/20,000th of the rain water.

Okay, it's not nothing. But it's not going to ruin all the farms or something.

But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.

Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.

P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!

The shares have different voting rights, and Zuck has majority control that way.

Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground.

Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter.

[1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.

I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.