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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

Another problem is water consumption. People don't realize it, but these data centers also consume incredible amounts of fresh water.

There are a handful that run off of grey water, and it varies somewhat - but overall the consumption is enormous. It's a big problem for water-starved areas.

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I wouldn't call it enormous. Some datacenters run dry cooling. A large datacenter (100MW) that uses evaporative cooling probably uses ~1000 acre-ft/yr, on par with a medium farm.

How do they consume the water exactly? If it’s just heat transfer, couldn’t it be reused once it passes through the data center? I would assume a small and cold country like Ireland could make good use of warm water, especially given its #2 ranking on tea consumption per capita!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...

A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0

Ireland discussed here is not water-starved and with high air humidity water loss (to evaporation) in cooling towers is low anyway.

I always assumed they created water from condensation, where is the water consumed?

A datacenter should be condensing as little as possible. The cold side (where condensation occurs) is the inside, but you don't want your cooling system dripping on your racks.

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