Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”
By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.
Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.
Their refusal to admit the problem will be the doom of us all.
There’s so much hand waving and speculation here. For example, the amount of water that Microsoft uses to cool its data centers is a global number right? Not California specific. And for that matter, if those data centers are in the Bay area that’s not going to matter for firefighting in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t think. AI makes for kind of a convenient scapegoat right now.
Also, I thought we were blaming the fires on climate change and DEI?
