Also, the bigger problem is buried at the bottom of the article:
As for water usage, data centers consumed 21.2 billion liters of water in 2014. That hit 66bn in 2023, with 84 percent of that going to hyperscale data centers. Hyperscalers alone are expected to consume between 60 and 124 billion liters in 2028.
We are running out of fresh water as it is.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/parts-america-water-crisis/story?id=98484121
We can potentially find new energy sources or find ways to make our current ones much more efficient. Finding new sources of fresh water is much harder. We can’t make the amount of water our bodies need and our crops need more efficient.
21.2 billion litres of water
fresh water
Are we sure it’s fresh? Are we excluding projects like data centers with seaside cooling loops?
Do you think if you exclude those it isn’t still a major fresh water wastage issue during a water crisis?
Here’s where just Google’s data centers are. How many of do those do you think are cooled with sea water?
Edit: Yes really. They have a DATA CENTER in LAS VEGAS.
They have a few, and some heavily armed security in some of them as well. I had a tour of one when a company I worked for was looking for a secondary DC. Bulletproof glass, assault rifles, body scanners, and a few other nutty things. Those gambling establishments have to store their data somewhere.
All that wasted energy for products no one asked for that are objectively trash.
100%. I work in tech and my entire career has not benefitted the public in any way. Its often even actively harmful. If someone knocked out the entire internet somehow and handed me a rake, the world would be a better more productive place, and psychologists say we’d all be happier.
The cloud bad. It was all a lie. Self hosting is more energy efficient and cost effective
Private cloud is better than public cloud for different goals.
Here, though, DC costs can be swept under the rug.
OPex (operational expende\iture) vs CAPex (capital expenditures) reporting rules steer companies toward going into the cloud, which is classified as Opex. Running your own DC is classified as capex. Capex makes shareholders very unhappy when expensive investments in infrastructure are bought. If the government wanted to, it could change the rules such that cloud company fees counted as CAPex, and the cloud companies would drastically shrink.
OPex (operational expendeture) vs CAPex (capital expenditures) reporting rules steer companies toward going into the cloud, which is classified as Opex. Running your own DC is classified as capex. Capex makes shareholders very unhappy when expensive investments in infrastructure are bought. If the government wanted to, it could change the rules such that cloud company fees counted as CAPex, and the cloud companies would drastically shrink.
The cloud wasn’t the worst idea when storage was pricey. These days, I can get a 2 TB SSD for $100 and download a ton of movies and TVs and games and still take months to fill it up. A cursory web search tells me a 2 TB SSD can hold over 1000 1080p movies.
And if you’re buying a bunch of really big games, you weren’t going to put them on the cloud to begin with even when cloud storage made a bit of sense.
With AI deployments continuing to increase, US data center energy grew at an increasing rate, hitting 176TWh by 2023, representing 4.4 percent of total US electricity consumption
More power! We need more power for what no one wanted!
Have no fear, Except for Texas with its mismanaged power grid, we have coal plants we can turn back on to take care of that. And coal miners we were retraining for other jobs can stop that retraining and get back to work in the coal mines. The US has an a functionally infinite supply of coal, so everyone just calm down.
The cat pics and government propoganda stream will continue to flow even if we have to turn our earth into a flaming greenhouse gasball to do it.
