[kmod]

I was also surprised when someone asked me about AI's water consumption because I had never heard of it being an issue. But a cursory search shows that datacenters use quite a bit more water than I realized, on the order of 1 liter of water per kWh of electricity. I see a lot of talk about how the hyperscalers are doing better than this and are trying to get to net-positive, but everything I saw was about quantifying and optimizing this number rather than debunking it as some sort of myth.

I find "1 liter per kWh" to be a bit hard to visualize, but when they talk about building a gigawatt datacenter, that's 278L/s. A typical showerhead is 0.16L/s. The Californian almond industry apparently uses roughly 200kL/s averaged over the entire year -- 278L/s is enough for about 4 square miles of almond orchards.

So it seems like a real thing but maybe not that drastic, especially since I think the hyperscaler numbers are better than this.