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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article:

> The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall.

So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.

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Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.

Unfortunately this won't help as datacenters are part of the backend, not the front.

> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another.

By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?

Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used.

Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more.

If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases.

Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.

Cleaning takes clean water and turns it into dirty water. Cooling takes clean water and heats it. The amount of clean water stays the same.

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