Forum: Too Lazy BBS

Re: How much water do the data centres use? It's a secret

From not@not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) to comp.misc on Wed Mar 11 07:19:07 2026

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Bruce <07.013@scorecrow.com> wrote:

On 08/03/2026 14:39, Ben Collver wrote:

That's 7.5 million to 30 million litres of drinking water every
single day. This is the reservoir's entire remaining capacity. Google
is taking absolutely the limit of all the water they can.

If it's the entire remaining drinking water capacity then presumably the town can no longer grow. Is that really what the city council should be aiming for?

No different to agriculture using massive amounts of water from
rivers etc. feeding reservoirs for drinking water. If different
rules apply to datacentres then that's probably because they've got
enough money to buy more influence than farmers could ever afford,
but anyway as you suggest it's really a problem with local
government/council. They could always do what they do for the farms
and build reservoirs dedicated to datacentre use. But that takes
time and if the next place has a sloppy government who are willing
to let them use up all their drinking water, the datacentres will
go there instead. In such cases it's the government that's the real
problem, any AI/datacentre company which didn't exploit that lack
of regulation would go bust waiting for the infrastructure to catch
up first.
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