XAI Campus in Memphis May Use 1M Gallons of Auqifer Drink Water per Day | Hacker News Reader

XAI Campus in Memphis May Use 1M Gallons of Auqifer Drink Water per Day

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> A family of four uses about 400 gallons of water a day. The supercomputer facility will require one million gallons a day.

How about a better comparison: a standard olympic sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons, so that's less than 2 Olympic swimming pools or three acre-feet of water per day. According to [1], an acre-foot of water is enough to supply two families in California for a year, so that's 4 x 365 = 1460 families worth of water per year (not including the water it takes to manufacture all the things they use and grow all the things they eat).

According to [2] it takes 600,000 gallons of water to grow 200 bushels of corn on 1 acre, so the XAI campus uses about 2 x 365 = 730 acres of corn worth of water per year. According to [3], farmers planted over 90 million acres of corn in 2019 so back of the napkin, the XAI campus uses 730/90,000,000 = 0.0008% as much water as just the US corn industry. Not all of agriculture, just corn.

Honestly doesn't sound like that much. If it's more than a datacenter and has offices, it might use less water than it takes to feed the people in the building.

[1] https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/acre-foot

[2] https://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2011/aug/water

[3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...

Since this is a municipal water supply, agricultural comparisons are not that helpful. It's the equivalent of adding 2,500 households, or 10,000ish citizens. Memphis population is about 610,000, so it's not a huge jump. A year's influx from somewhere else? That said, it's a lot more than nothing. I wonder what the pollution load is from it.

> a standard olympic sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons, so that's less than 2 Olympic swimming pools or three acre-feet of water per day

You don't drain and refill an olympic swimming pool every single day

I don't get it. Water used for cooling is not gone, not evaporated into the air, not absorbed into soil. It just comes back hot, and likely with a slight admixture of anti-corrosion substances.

Do they use evaporative cooling to make the water cool and reuse, and that's where they lose such amounts? If so, it would generate substantial clouds, like some power stations do.

There are a lot of people who simply don't understand the hydrologic cycle. They genuinely think water gets "used up".

Then there are those who think that just because water is in short supply in California, the same is true elsewhere.

Los Angeles gets around 15 inches of precipitation per year. Memphis gets around 55.

Then of course, Memphis is on the Mississippi River. A "million gallons a day" sounds like a lot to people who are bad at math and are impressed by a lot of zeros.

I couldn't find numbers for Memphis, specifically, but at Vicksburg, MS (not that far away) the Mississippi flow rate is around 5.7 million gallons per second.

Even if the water were actually getting used up (which you correctly point out isn't the case), 1 million gallons per day would only be around 0.000002 of the Mississippi's water.

It's a trivial amount. In fact it's much less than what could even be described as a trivial amount.

The whole "aquifer" argument is nonsense. No one is going to pay to use drinking water for cooling purposes when the Mississippi is right there.

The real issue here is that Musk has become the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour to a certain segment of the population, and thus must be constantly the focus of the Two Minutes Hate.

Google’s data centers collectively consumed 450,000 gallons per day on average in 2021. This was cited at the time as being the same as 29 golf courses in the southwestern US.

Texas and California each have nearly 1000 golf courses. This is then roughly 15 million gallons per day per state for golf courses.

Close the bottom five percent of golf courses in these two states and start three more Googles or another massive AI company. The relative benefits are incomparable.

Tennessee doesn’t have a water problem [1].

[1] https://www.drought.gov/states/tennessee

Well that makes the article even less pointful.

edit: the link comments that although the southeast is considered water-rich,

“Tennessee also experienced a high impact drought in 2016 that was a primary factor in several major wildfires, including the Gatlinburg wildfires that resulted in loss of life and widespread infrastructure damage. These droughts had far-reaching impacts on agriculture, water availability for municipalities and industry, and wildfires.”

So perhaps it is enough of a lever in the public memory to justify publishing some PR pieces implying they should hire someone to address the problem.

Memphis is unique in sitting on a major artesian aquifer, and its tap water is as good or better than can be bought in a bottle. The environmental group here is concerned about unsustainable use of the aquifer, instead of gray water or Mississippi River water.

TFA states the facility will use gray water, but I think it’s good of watchdogs to make sure that stays the case.

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