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Comment by spongebobstoes | Hacker News Reader

what does water usage mean? is that 4bn cubic meters of water permanently out of circulation somehow? is the water corrupted with chemicals or destroyed or displaced into the atmosphere to become rain?

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The water is used to sink heat and then instead of cooling it back down they evaporate it, which provides more cooling. So the answer is 'it eventually becomes rain'.

I understand. but why this is bad? is there some analysis of the beginning and end locations of the water, and how the utility differs between those locations?

Hot water disrupts marine life for one very very big problem.

Depending on the locatin of the hot water you can cause disruptions to water currents, the north atlantic waterway is being studied to how much global warming is affecting it.

If greenland melts, and the water doesnt get cold up there, then the mexico current to europe ends and England becomes colder than Canada.

If your AI model has a data center in the atlantic, it could be furthering that issue.

(Millions of animals are also dead)

Water is expensive to move (except by pipes), and expensive to purify from salt water. This is why regional droughts are a bad thing.

Fresh clean water in your area is a wonderful thing.

it takes work to get water from where it's missing to where it's needed. work takes water and other resources which will need to be moved, too, which takes water that isn't where it should be because obsession.

Clean drinking water is actually de facto a finite resource. It does recycle through nature, but large reservoirs and water tables are slow to recharge, often taking millennia to form, so there’s a lossiness in that sense — our usage and loss of potable water can’t be higher than the overall recharge rate. So it’s something we could exhaust without big technical breakthroughs (converting salt water quicker than nature does in large quantities, etc). We rely on maintaining a sustainable rate of consumption to avoid setting up future generations for potential catastrophe, basically. Not saying data centre water usage could alone be the difference, but it’s not implausible if it increases exponentially. Another factor is existing reserves can be contaminated and made undrinkable, adding an unpredictable factor into calculations. It’s an interesting topic to read about.

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