Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more.
So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon.
Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.
This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/16/climate/lake-powell-reser...
https://www.dw.com/en/romania-shuts-nuclear-plant-hungary-da...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/06/17/colorado-river-desa...
> Fully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water.
Most of these large bodies of water are salty, it's expensive as shit to desalinate it completely infeasible to pump it in land for agriculture and people
Either the entire world is stupid and has been for decades and you're a genius. Or your 5 minutes take on the subject is completely unrealistic and you're missing half of the story ?
2) You replied that it was saltwater and desalinating it was expensive.
3) I pointed out that saltwater evaporates fine. You seem to have assumed that cooling can only be done with freshwater for some reason.
4) You now seem to believe that I'm a simpleton who is suggesting that the people who live near large amounts of freshwater should also import salt water for some reason? Honestly I'm lost. They don't need to, they have fresh water which will also evaporate fine.
If water is scarce where you live, you live in a bad (and relatively rare) place that humans aren't meant to live. You should be talking to your representative to make sure data centers don't waste your imported water just because it's cheaper.
Everyone else will be fine.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
Maybe if you live in a desert. I'm not going to. We don't all live in the same place, and different rules are necessary. I suspect that much of the talk about evaporative cooling comes from treating places where it is sensible to do as if they are places where it's not.
There is a lake not far from that it would take about 3 days to cross on foot at it's SHORTEST point. Walking the full length would take about TWO WEEKS, someone would probably die of dysentery along the way.
Water scarcity is a regional problem that's being passed off as a universal concern for all of human-kind. It isn't. Earth has water, lots of it. Some places are just crummy places for humans to live.
That's ridiculous and untrue.
If you live in the desert, stop doing that... or get them to laws for your specific place in the world. Where I live we have something close to an infinite supply of fresh water.