Hacker News Reader

The report says that water consumption tripled due to AI datacenters, in 2023! Most of it was on electricity generation to support the datacenters.

But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.

EDIT: Ah, I did misread it. Sorry!

View on HN

No, it doesn't.

It says that datacenters now use 3× the amount of water they used to use--it's specifically limited to that very, very narrow sector.

> But that's tripled of water use across all sectors due to datacenter buildout. So no "comparison" to other uses is needed.

You're saying almond farm water use tripled due to data center buildout? What other meaning of "all sectors" could make sense of this claim? The report clearly says 17 billion while all other sectors are in the trillions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com