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I mapped estimated water use across 30 major AI/cloud data centers

5 points by senazadeh

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by westurner

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Metrics for this?
OPS/FLOPS/TOPS/QOPS: OPS/kWhr, OPS/liter_water,
From https://www.thegreengrid.org/ , whose board includes many industry folks:
WUE: Water Usage Effectiveness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_usage_effectiveness
GPUE: Green Power Usage Effectiveness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Power_Usage_Effectivenes...

by senazadeh

1 subcomments

Made this after getting curious how the water-use numbers thrown around in AI news articles actually stack up site-by-site. A few notes:
What it shows: a running estimate of global AI/data-center water use, a map of 30 real campuses (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Apple, Alibaba) sized by estimated annual water draw, and a comparison chart against things like golf courses, fast fashion, and fossil fuel plants on a log scale.
Data sources: per-site figures are triangulated from sustainability reports, utility/permit filings, and known cooling tech + climate where companies don't disclose (most don't). The global baseline is anchored to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's 2024 Data Center Energy Usage Report, linked in the site's Methodology section.
Tools: React + D3.js for the map, all client-side, no backend.
Caveat I want to be upfront about: these are order-of-magnitude estimates, not audited numbers, happy to take corrections if anyone has better sourcing on specific sites!
https://www.thirstymachines.com/