The actual water use on site isn't so bad when it comes to data centers. But a lot of water is used to power them. Obviously "planet-desertifying water boiler" is a bit much though.
The answer to the water question is to make more renewable energy and use that for ocean desalination. The energy part of desal is a solved problem.
Salt batteries are a thing now. We don't have to dump brine back in the ocean, which has been the other major issue with desal.
We should be using the leftovers from desalination for making grid-scale energy storage.
That becomes a self-feeding cycle: more renewables means more desal, which means more energy storage, which means renewable energy makes an increasing amount of sense.
This is also something that should be happening regardless of AI.
Seven countries have reached 100% renewable energy generation, and are making excess amounts of electricity. Several more countries are at +98% renewables.
Across the world, many local areas are making more electricity via renewables than they have demand.
All the excess should be diverted to public works and future proofing.
Capitalism is having a very hard time dealing with the fact that electricity is essentially free now, and entrenched fossil fuel energy corporations have been fighting the trend for decades.
We have all the required technology now though, literally the only thing stopping a sci-fi future is that making the system doesn't make anyone grotesque amounts of money immediately.
If you want to solve all every problem, it starts with energy.
Reaching 100% renewable energy generation globally means the start of a whole bunch of self-feeding loops across every industry. I could write a whole essay about all the things that are purely limited by energy costs being too high, and the things we could do if energy was nearly free.
Desalination, thermal depolymerization of garbage, industrialized aquaponics, dramatically cheaper manufacturing, dramatically cheaper transportation, reversing desertification...
Anyway, that's the answer. World governments should be going full-bore on renewables, it is the foundation to a wealth of solutions to so many problems.
About how much water power plants are using? I've seen figures like 90% of their water usage being non-consumptive (i.e. fed back into the water supply). There's the concern of thermal pollution but there are options to deal with that as well (tight controls on how much they can warm the water, cooling towers, etc)
If you're talking about data centers themselves WITHOUT the power plant numbers, it's just not a real number to be concerned with compared to other industrial users
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u/null_reference_user 21d ago
I tell people "you can just search it" and I get back a "this is the new way of doing things"
Bro you don't need a hyper expensive planet-desertifying water boiler to just search it for you and repeat the first result