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Comment by polski-g | Hacker News Reader

"Datacenter water usage" is a comment I'd expect to see on Reddit--not a VC forum with allegedly intelligent people.

I live in New Mexico. I do not consider Hacker News to be a VC forum. For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn if I need some sort of credentials to get you to respond constructively to my point rather than with some hand-wavey ad hominem.

> For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn

Reminds me of a quote from some otherwise forgettable movie I saw: "My father left me with very little, except for all his money."

By "worth" in this context, I mean "authority to speak in a context claimed to be limited to a certain kind of person" (a limitation I do not acknowledge exists on HN, or anywhere, really).

For the record, my net worth increased by about $1M before taxes based on the 1 year of options I got at amzn. But not relevant in this context.

Could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that datacenter water usage is not a significant community issue? Or that such community issues should be irrelevant to VC conversations?

The former. Datacenters don't package water in a rocket and shoot it into the sun. They run it through a heat transfer and return it slightly warmer.

I'm not following you. The concern isn't that they somehow destroy the water, it's the consumption of processed water that has a limited supply. Are you saying a gallon of data center water use has less impact on supply than other uses? Recaptured water from evaporative cooling needs to be reprocessed just like any other water source, right?

Lets put this in perspective. A continuous 1 gigawatt draw is enough energy to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour. Assuming a generous 350 liters per person per day that's the equivalent of 90k people.

If you don't actually boil it and instead return only lukewarm water you're looking at something like 15x more (I don't know the exact factor) due to how large the heat of vaporization is.

How exactly are they supposed to return (ballpark) 1 million people worth of water to the utility company? Let's again put this in perspective. The entire Seattle metropolitan area hosts ~4.1 million people. The entire state of Florida is only 23.5 million. This is an absurd amount of water we're taking about here.

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