That definitely feels high, mine is a household of two but I know exactly how much water I use because I'm off grid and I have to go haul it myself from the city my tank on my trailer holds 275 gallons and that's generally enough to last me anywhere between a week to two weeks depending on how much laundry I need to do.

I shower daily, do dishes all the usual stuff so what the fuck is the average family doing with all that water that they are using more in a day than I do in a week

I feel like they're adding in water usage to manufacture goods and deliver services. We're a family of four allotted 2k gal a month for a base rate, over that is charged extra. We've never gone over that 2k, and we're using normally (dishes, laundry, bathing, watering plants, etc).

Looking up the average for New Zealand, I see everything from 250l per family to 275l per person quoted as average.

Much of New Zealand doesn't meter their water, so all they can do is measure the water put into the system and divide by the number of households/estimated people (minus commercial/industrial use that is metered).

In the area I live in, they are working on putting in meters because they suspect they lose a huge amount of water to leaks on private property that go unnoticed.

I wonder where this water usage figure for the US comes from. Is it measured on meters at their property?

And from what I hear people complain about in memes, I think parts of the US probably use a lot of water for watering lawns, something not that common here because it rains a fair amount.

Edit: lol I was trying to respond to @abcd@feddit.org but 🤷

So that'd be like 200 years of a households usage then, 30 million gallons...?

A citizen would ask the court to declare the company bankrupt and to issue a winding up order in order to distribute the business's remaining assets to those it owes money to.

Do you have a link for the HK Hynix / OpenAI thing you are talking about?

Is there more detail than what we already knew a few months ago?

It sounds like the waste head they create is getting harder and harder to cool with heat exchangers. So evaporative cooling is more efficient (power wise, not water usage wise) and they basically spray water on the cooling towers and it blows away in the wind as vapor.

The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you're not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.

Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (turbine output - pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we're cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.

So, bottom line: The racks aren't really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something "useful" (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).

If you put a turbine in the cooling tower, it'll take energy from the water by slowing it down. This will increase the humidity at the bottom of the tower, which impedes the liquid water from evaporating. This makes the tower cool slower.

It's unfortunately just warm water, not steam, so it's pretty hard to extract energy into it in any meaningful way

There's an Apple data center near me. They feed the hot water into the district heating system and use wind for electricity.

Even if it's environmentally neutral, it's still a ressource hog. Other businesses who want to switch to electricity are currently put on hold, because the data centers are maxing out the grid capacity. I guess it's a luxury problem, but they're causing delays for other businesses in going green, and all only for the purpose of storing iPhone messages and family pictures.

They have about a dozen employees. I think it's mainly security. This has received some criticism because they originally pitched the idea with thousands of new jobs.

So overall, even in a best case scenario it's waste of renewable energy and area which doesn't create any income.

Well some data centers are taking water from a source and move it somewhere else like into the air. Now people who use that source for their water needs have less water. Since the data centers take more water than what gets replenished back into the source naturally.

Many of them use what are called "evaporative cooling systems", that consume massive amounts of water, and simply release it into the air, as steam. It is a very "energy efficient" method of cooling...meaning it uses less electricity, but a fuck-ton of water.

I think it's unfair to downvote you for playing devils advocate here, especially when you're making it obvious that that's what you're doing. People should do better and rather challenge themselves to explain why you're wrong in a way that can convince the devils advocate. It serves as a nice exercise for re-thinking your position and arguments.

For my attempt: They're "wasting" water in the sense that liquid water at ambient conditions is a limited resource. They're taking that water, and either turning it into steam, or heating it a lot before releasing it back to the environment. Both uses reduce the amount of liquid water at ambient conditions available in reservoirs connected to infrastructure made to extract it for public use. That is the resource we use for everything from drinking water, to showering and cleaning, to making food and filling radiators.

You could say that "wasting water" is imprecise, but I would argue that it serves as a convenient shorthand for "wasting liquid water at ambient conditions accumulated in reservoirs that are connected to extraction and treatment infrastructure", which becomes a mouthful when you say it often.

A portion os the water apparently evaporates. Of course water isn't destroyed.