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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Has anybody ever driven out to northern VA to see all the data centers.

It’s eerie and creepy looking.

It’s sad they took all this beautiful land and destroyed it.

Now VA has a SERIOUS power problem.

The cost of power went up 25% in 2021. It’s only going up more.

AI required fast and hot computers that need water too cool it. There is going to be a water problem soon.  Right now the water use is unsustainable.

It doesn’t even provide jobs to the area.

[/quote]

Virginia has some nuclear reactors with plans to expand.

Data centers consume less water compared to other sectors. They use about 3.3% of the water consumed by golf courses. So let's shut down the golf courses first.

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One data center (currently) uses 3x more water than 1 golf course. That is currently, with AI and high performance computing the water consumption is going to go up 4x by 2028.

Golf courses return water to the environment filtered so the water returned is cleaner than the water that enters. Data center don’t return water to the environment at all there is and 80% loss of local water.

Data center return methane gas to the environment, golf courses do not.

Both should be regulated to ensure neither hurt the environment.

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Are the data centers burning the water? It has to be returned to the environment. Methane gas? Hilarious. [/quote]

The data centers are not returning water to the environment as groundwater.[/quote]

In Northern Virginia, the water comes from the Potomac. The data centers return that water back to the Potomac. [/quote]

That is literally not true. Most data centers use evaporative cooling. It is cheaper not to reuse the water because it costs money collect the steam and let it cool down again to reuse the water another time. Much of this water does not come from the Potomac, a substantial amount of it is coming from groundwater or reservoirs that people need for drinking water. Most of it is not returned back to the water supply. [/quote]

Northern Virginia is supplied by the Fairfax Water Authority. Where do you think that water comes from?

Evaporative cooling means the water comes out of the sky at some point as rain. It's not lost. Also, there's no steam involved. [/quote]

It doesn’t come out of the sky in the same location. Water vapor gets carried away by the wind. Taking water from the ground and reservoirs causes the water table to go down. This causes people’s wells to go dry, and it causes subsidence which damages buildings and increases the risk of flood damage to homes. You don’t know what you are talking about. Taking groundwater and putting in into the air as water vapor  does not magically mean that the net impact on water resources is zero. [/quote]

https://reason.com/2026/03/07/the-joys-of-data-centers/

[quote]
"Most data centers use about the same amount of water or less than an average large office building, although a few require substantially more, and some require less than a typical household," notes a research report prepared by the Virginia General Assembly's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. These facilities consume water in two ways: directly, as a means of cooling their equipment, and indirectly, via the water used in generating the power they consume.

Neither makes much of a dent in America's fresh water supply. Data centers' water consumption is a tiny portion of overall U.S. water usage.[/quote]

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That is also a lie. There are individual data center campuses in VA that have contracts with local utilities to use 5-10 million gallons of water each day. That is equivalent to the daily water usage of 20,000-40,000 households. Data centers typically use at least 5,000 gallons of water per MW each day for cooling. Virginia has at least 24,000 MW of data centers that have been approved, which equals a minimum of 120M gallons of water consumption per day to cool the data centers. That is equivalent to daily water consumption of around 200,000 households. A very significant amount that can overburden local infrastructure.[/quote]

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