I'm not trusting the linked blog itself, so I looked up the sources it used. The blog is claiming:

> estimates that data centers in Maricopa County will use 905 million gallons of water in 2025

One reason I don't trust this blog, is that this text links out, but the link itself ends in:

  utm_source=chatgpt.com#:~:text=At%20the%20state,annual%20water%20use.

And when I follow through, the actually linked text (on domain circleofblue.org) says:

  Walsh’s research at Bluefield indicates that data center water consumption in Arizona in 2025 will be roughly 905 million gallons

Not being an American, I had to look up Maricopa country; according to Wikipedia, it's 62% of the state's total population, so lots, but definitely not all; and according to this other list of data centres, it has most (but still not all) of Arizona's data centers: https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/arizona

Either way, whoever made this blog post, wasn't paying quite close enough attention to the sources for my taste. Don't mind people using ChatGPT as a search engine (it's better than Google these days, after all), but this does feel like a blog that was vibed, not one that was carefully curated.

Now, if the circleofblue.org claim about 905 million gallons is true, I can compare it to the claim on the hopefully-trustworthy arizona.edu domain that "Arizona used 7.0 million acre-feet of water in 2017": https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/arizonas-water-us... and the state population of 7,582,384 and can see this is very close to approximately one acre-foot of water per person per year, but I don't need to be approximated when I can do an exact calculation in Wolfram Alpha and get 300,824 gallons/person/year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=7+million+acre-feet+%2F...

This makes 905 million gallons/year equivalent to 3,008 people, not 30k, but remember this also includes all the other industry, farming, etc.: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28905+million+gallons%...

But the two really important parts here are (1): according to the previously mentioned map of Arizona's data centres and circleofblue.org link, that's for all 108 data centres across Arizona not just one; (2) 102 of the 108 data centres are in Phoenix, which has a population of about 1.6 million and isn't going to notice the impact of 30k, let alone 3k, extra residents.

(But then, can I trust circleofblue.org and datacenters.com? Is anything on the internet trustworthy any more?)