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Comment by po1nt | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the point of measuring how much water we use if we're not poluting it. It's water. It will evaporate and rain down again. It's renewable resource.

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By that logic water can never be wasted, it all stays on Earth and eventually comes down somewhere.

Of course water use above replenishment rates is bad, it doesn't magically rain down in the same spot and all the underground water tables get full again. They deplete, meaning existing consumers have to dig deeper or just go without water. Even ancient peoples knew that if you take too much water from a well, it will dry out.

I imagine you would see the point in measuring how much water data centres use when one opens near you, and you can't flush your toilet any more.

You can drain aquifers faster than they get re-filled. Fresh water is renewable, but it renews relatively slowly in many places.

You can drain aquifers faster than they get re-filled. Fresh water is renewable, but it renews relatively slowly in many places.

Months in some places. But in the arid locations, it can take thousands of years for water to go from surface to aquifer.

A lot of these data centers and chip fabs are built in arid places because labor is cheap, taxes are low, and land is cheap. The reason for those three things is that there's not enough freaking water in the first place.

Slurping it up to run digital addiction mills and predatory advertising falls somewhere on a spectrum ranging from just plain stupid to abhorrently immortal.

I agree but then using a volume of water as a measure without provided context is just fearmongering.

Draining oasis in a desert might have much higher impact than one of the thousands of lakes in canada but still, it's a renewable resource. Most of the places suitable for datacenters have plenty of it anyway as datacenters are more suited for colder climates which usually have plenty of water.

Water resources are isolated, so moving purified water from one basin to another via evaporation does matter. But the OP is right that the specific cases of data centers usually don't matter.

Because water access is constrained geographically. You have to pipe it in if you use it all up. The US is seeing the worst spring drought on record: https://time.com/article/2026/05/10/drought-US-farmers-crops...

That's not the fault of datacenters though. Not even a local heavy industry.

My interpretation of their point was that more demand for water with a fixed supply of water will only make our water problems worse. Not that data centers are causing this problem on their own.

At a global scale yes, on the local scale perhaps not (or not on an acceptable timeframe)

It will evaporate and rain down again somewhere else. It's lost locally. In a place with a limited local water supply, that still will cause plenty of local pain.

Yeah but building a datacenter in colder wetter climate will hopefully bring the water somewhere else, usually to somewhere dryer.

At least that's my logic

This assumes that they do actually build in colder wetter climates. Most of the time they dont.

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