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Comment by whycome | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean to be consumed in this context? After used for cooling isn’t it clean enough for drink and other uses? Can’t it go back into other systems? Can’t it be used for agriculture?

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"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue.

Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.

There is also the issue that evaporated water doesn’t necessarily go back to the original water source

What if it’s in an area where there is abundant surface water and 40” of precipitation per year? Not every data center pumps groundwater.

That's a small portion of the consumption. According to the article, the vast majority of the water is for electricity generation, and the vast majority of that water is from hydroelectric power generation. Hydroelectric generation does not evaporate the water, it releases it downstream in a clean, usable form.

The title seems to be accidentally confusing, the 17 billion is ALL evaporative.

If we want the other 80% (which I don't personally think we care about) 211 billion more.

Can that vapor be captured and condensed again? The energy transfer of evaporation happens before it reaches the cooling tower exit. It's a conservation of energy thing for sure but condensation is doable.

This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage.

This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.

Exactly. Is that figure about the water 'flowing' through the datacenter? I want to believe they would not just dump it after use.

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