30 MILLION gallons??? Jesus fuck! Burn every one of them!!!

One of the more "out there" arguments I've read in recent times was a guy arguing basically that data centers don't make water go away because of the water cycle. That water can't really be destroyed. It made me feel the same way as when people respond to the killing of the earth with "The earth isn't going anywhere. It'll still be here and in a couple million years it will be fine." Fucking psychos.

They should have had their permits revoked and been forced to shut down.

Personally, I would have just "fixed" the problem by turning it off without notice. Then arrest whoever comes to turn it back on.

so... it wasn't "unnoticed"....

I hate these shitty headlines, like

"Chemical X - (Perfectly Safe) - Kills 5,000 Daily!"

same thing here. the press lies to push the same bullshit

We need to get rid of all of the data centers to save humanity. Who woulda thunk?

The thing is, we could harvest the heat and use it to generate energy instead of burning thru a natural resource were short of. (Edit: talking about potable water, not resources for energy generation)

It would just be expensive, and capitalism always takes the cheapest route regardless of anything else.

Obviously it's not going to be much energy generation, but "waste heat" is only a thing if you're wasting it. And at this scale it's not insignificant, we shouldn't be wasting it.

For those wondering how TF a data center that is not even online yet could be using so much water:

• Soil compaction
• Dust suppression

That's it. For the scale of that project, that's all it would take to use 30 million gallons.

When they're done, they also need to flush miles of pipes which could also use a few million gallons but I don't think they're at that phase yet.

This amount of water would be used no matter what buildings they were constructing in that amount of space. Meaning: This article is pretty misleading clickbait (because a lot of people hate data centers lately, the headline will generate clicks).

The alternative is to have loads of data centers instead of one big one. That's more expensive, so they build a single big one.

If you don't like data centers, it makes sense to build a few really, really big ones like this rather than lots of smaller ones. Because data centers are necessary and important aspects of modern living. They're not going to just go away. There's nothing that could replace them.

Outrage started bubbling up last year when residents of an affluent subdivision named Annelise Park in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed their water pressure was unusually low.

When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.

All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.