Share Funny Videos, Images, Memes, Quotes and more

Not that datacenters are great, but agriculture should not be glossed over like that. The place the water goes for agriculture is not where we want / need the water to go. I.e into the plants moved elsewhere and into the air carried away. It depletes these waterways

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs

"meanwhile it’s eternally captured by a data"

The closed-water loop systems are that concerning water-usage wise at all. They don't use as much water. It's the open-loop ones with evaporation tower that use much more water. Those also go into the air and flow somewhere else, same as it is with agriculture

"if not contaminated with chemicals too"

Runoff with pollution from datacenters is more of an issue from construction from my understanding rather than the cooling (not that this isn't an issue!)

It's worth noting that agriculture has continuous problems with runoff. Fertilizer and manure runoff is a massive concern from agriculture, often a massive one for local water quality. For instance, one region in NZ needs a 12x reduction in the dairy industry nearby just to meet safe drinking water standards